linoleum rug

couple beers and some chips

2009-03-28T16:10:00.000-07:00

dear herr's
i have lived in the city of philadelphia for about two years now. i moved from michigan and a lot of things were different, including the potato chips. herr's has been one of the most pleasant subtle surprises coming to this part of the country. i am particularly a fan of the kettle cooked line, especially jalapeno and salt and vinegar.
as far as the regular chips are concerned, i prefer the old bay and red hot varieties, and this brings me to my suggestion. lately, i have purchased these flavors in both one ounce size and also the package that sells for 99 cents. i was surprised to discover that the chips were wavy style; i expected standard thin cut potatoes. while this is still an indisputably quality product, i would appreciate knowing precisely what i am purchasing. i realize that changing the labeling is a hassle in some respects, and perhaps even impractical in current conditions. however, the situation also heightens consumers' desire to know precisely what they are purchasing. please consider distinguishing different styles of chips on all packaging.
on another note, i am curious about whether the cheese steak flavor kettle chips have been discontinued. i would also like to note that i have recently been enjoying herr's hot fries, however, the supply seems to have run its course. please continue promoting this product at its present excellent value and overall quality.
thank you, sincerely
ben franklin

and i ate some good stuff

2009-03-18T14:35:00.000-07:00

obviously, things wrapped up and we made it back to america without significant incident. i didn't get a chance to detail some aspects of the trip, mostly because a lot of those aspects aren't that interesting for other people. food, however, is a pretty universal topic, and there were some notable things to eat along the way.
the first stop was in the carousel capital of the world, home of the square deal, the one and only parlour city, binghampton new york. we weren't there all that long, but i saw a few things. i liked the feel of the place a lot; it reminded me of some places i have been back in the midwest, trying hard to find its place and assert its primacy in its niches. it is just over the northern border of pennsylvania, pretty much due north from philly. there is a SUNY location there and the broome county arena, host to a couple notable phish shows once upon a time. but our purpose was not carousels, colleges, up and coming jam bands, or even parlours. no, we sought a square deal in the form of the city's famed sandwich, the spiedie. basically, it is some tasty marinated pork (or some other meat) on italian bread. i was trying to keep things cheap on the trip, so i just picked up a basic six inch. to my surprise, the sandwich was straight up meat and bread. nothing else. fortunately, this turned out to be because nothing else was required. that was some damn tasty meat, and just the right amount of juices transferred to the bread to soften it up without approaching sogginess. totally delicious, would eat again, a++. perhaps i will even return for one of the multiple festivals dedicated to this unique and proud sandwich. the big one also includes a balloon rally. i'm sold.
the next stop was rochester. i felt quite at home there; it is totally the gun rue of new york. comparable size, climate, and cityscape. that feeling that there was something going on, but one had to know how to find it and help to make it happen. our stop was once again wholly food motivated, only this time we were in search of a unique combination of flavor and experience, as opposed to the more pure culinary delight that was the spiedie. our quest took us to the wizened establishment of nick tahou hots, an institution for nearly a century in a building that had to be a couple decades older. this restaurant is famed for and the holder of the unlikely trademark "garbage plates". while the name is certainly not particularly appetizing and a description of the dish might not tickle your fancy, we concluded this was an experience we could not pass up. the concept is fairly simple: there is a base of some combination of french or home fries, macaroni salad, and/or baked beans. on top of this base there will be a typical american meat item, i.e. hot dogs or hamburger patties or a fish fillet. on top of this there must be something akin to a medium-bodied bean-less chili called hots sauce (not to be confused with hot sauce), which is in turn topped with onions. spicy brown mustard, cheese, or other enhancements may also be implicated. i tried to find a better picture than the one used in the wikipedia article i linked above, but let's face it, food photography is never easy, and making something like this look good is pretty much not going to happen. but the concept is pretty easy. i must say, it was an overall satisfying experience. i got plenty of solid food in me and a novelty experience at a reasonable price, and this ninety year old hot dog shop gets by on its gimmick. kind of cool if you ask me. we were kind of nervous about ordering because of the old-school feel of the place and the grizzled employees. this is because we have all been living in philly and such a setting there means you had better know what you want and how to ask for it if you want a modicum of pleasant service. turned out everything was fine of course, and there was nothing to worry about, but it was definitely a not in kansas anymore moment. big ups to rochester.
we crossed at buffalo, but since we had just finished the plates all of like an hour ago there was no desire on anyone's part to look into the possible advantages of the original authentic wings bearing the city's name. maybe some other time. beyond buffalo, the border, and then to toronto. while there are certainly plenty of definitively canadian food items (i love this list) and many normal foods available "quebec style", we did not get to a whole lot of those due to budget, region, and the fact that toronto is a global city in canada more than a canadian city. there were endless food options in toronto, but i mostly ate peanut butter sandwiches this time around as restaurants weren't all that cheap and are loaded with some pretty striking and unexpected taxes. sometimes that is the way it goes. however, there was one canadian food item we had all been set on from the get-go and would not be denied: poutine. french fries. cheese curds. brown gravy. what's not to like? this is one of the best possible combinations of food ever. so savory. so delicious. so filling. my friend summed up the experience pretty well: tastes great, but as soon as you're finished you feel like you just swallowed a pound of quick-set concrete. but damn was that stuff unbeleivable. my mouth is totally watering now as i meditate on the street culinary genius that is this dish. just think about how good this would be right now.
in other canadian junk food news, i checked out a couple chip flavors unavailable to me normally. the definitive canadian potato chip flavor is ketchup, but i didn't bother with these as i had looked into them before back in michigan. if you're curious, they are a lot like barbeque, but without the sweetness. pretty good. the flavors i tried were both from a company called old dutch, which of course amused me. i do not really associate the dutch with potato chips, but maybe i should. the first kind was creamy dill. the name was not misleading. imagine a sour cream and onion chip but with dill instead of onions. that was about it. the dill doesn't cut through the cream as well, but instead leaves room for some sour taste, which might have been the first time i associated sour cream with anything bearing the attribute of sour. they were pretty strong and a little cloying, as was the other variety i tried. i checked out the "ranch" because i am always curious about what qualifies for that title and the french translation on the bag bore no resemblence at all to the english, instead proclaiming the flavor to be something about three peppers. these were some damn flavorful chips. pretty tasty, but i think my breath would have felled a horse at twenty paces. they were actually so strong that i didn't finish the single serving bag all at once. overall, solid stuff, a change of pace, but nothing so exotic as what i hear tell of and had an opportunity to sample slightly from the other side of the atlantic.
that is about it for the good food news. like i said, it was a lot of peanut butter sandwiches for me. i did have an epic enormous hot dog from a cart. that was delicious. we also scored two for five falafel, which was a great deal. but yeah, that was about it. and since there is no more food that must be discussed, i would like to say a word about the beverages. by beverages, i pretty much mean beer. i am not sure if i mentioned this in passing in a previous post, but damn did it leave something to be desired. first of all, ontario has some pain in the ass booze laws which are not entirely dissimilar from pennsylvania, although less restrictive in some ways and moreso in others. mostly it was a real pain in the ass to get takeout beer, which is near-impossible to acquire outside of the state run booze stores that have liquor wine and beer or the beer store (that is its actual name). after some difficulty locating a beer store, we broke down and went to a state store, and happened to wind up at the largest one. the good news was they had an impressive selection compared to the other one we had looked at, the bad news was that prices are not only fixed, but are fixed by the container, meaning no breaks on quantity. understanding that the situation was not going to change, we hoped to make the best of it and take advantage of the wide singles selection. most of what i got i believe was imported into canada, but much of it i had not seen in the states before. a lot more packaging in large cans. i picked out a couple familiar things, lowenbrau and a warsteiner dunkel, a couple of varietal bocks from the same brewer, a canadian ipa, some ten percenter man can needed for bang for buck, and another thing or two. my god, was that stuff bland. for all their restrictive ad laws (borne out through not-so-subtle changes to american ads on canadian networks), i can't believe they let this company call that beer an ipa. i think the brewery is owned by labatt or something? in any case, this was just ridiculous. it looked like fucking budweiser, and was about as hoppy as pbr. it wasn't a crappy beer, but there was just nothing about it that said ipa. it was kind of like yuengling's lord chesterfield. those bocks? apparently from the same school of bock as texas' own shiner. huber bock has at least quadruple the flavor, and that ain't sayin much. i mean they weren't offensive, but they were not that pleasing either. the bang for the buck beer was not worth it at all in a steel reserve kind of way. the saving grace in all this comes from the one canadian craft brewery we all know and love: unibrou. 750 ml bottles were widely available at the standardized price of $5.40 canadian. now that my friends is a deal. la fin du monde and maudite kick the crap out of the other options, especially at the price. now you know.
as i mentioned, the beer was kind of tricky to get the hang of aquiring the first couple days. but hey, we were all on vacation, it was the boys, we didn't have a lot of money to go out, weren't sure about how to get beer, and we were going through the duty free. that meant liquor. we had some bombay sapphire, which was nice because i haven't had good gin in ages and i rather enjoy it. that being said, i don't think bombay had ever been mixed with such shitty orange juice (thanks all night convenience store across from hostel) or such flat perrier. oh well, it was still alright. i am bad at making decisions about things to eat or drink when i have a lot of appealing options, so i was looking around back at the duty free for a while. i wanted to go cheap but not too cheap, enjoy my savings in quality more than quantity, but the setup wasn't completely conducive to that. so i'm looking around for a while and change my mind a couple times. jager sounded real good, but cost a little more than i wanted to spend. however, one shelf down a bottle called out to me. it said hey, i have as much liquor of equal strength and that strong licorice flavor you're looking for. all this at a savings of approximately ten us dollars. my name is sambuca. so sambuca it was, and i like the flavor but i didn't remember it being so thick and sugary. so yeah, i still have like a significant amount of sambuca. i think people drink it after italian. come over and i will make you pasta and we will drink this stuff. i could use a hand with it.

totale

2009-03-10T20:28:00.000-07:00

i have seen a lot of baseball in the last few days, and it has been excellent. i got to see the us hang up 8 runs on venezuela in the sixth, the italians upset the candians, and the terrible result of a near-mercy match between italy and venezuela. all sorts of great stuff, huge home runs, a bunch of triples, the best defense i've ever seen. don't let anyone tell you that this is supposed to be spring training. i've seen spring training games, this is far from it. the competition has been intense in most if not all cases. the whole competition is pretty compelling at this point, things like australia scoring a massive upset, the korean's dramatic 1-0 win over japan, and more importantly, the dutch beating the domincan republic in not one but two unthinkable upsets to advance to the next round, and the finale tonight in shocking fashion further heightened by the competition's esoteric rule about starting with two runners after twelve innings, which isn't too offensive of an idea really. tomorrow we find out the groups for the next round. the dutch could play the americans, and that is a wild prospect. the cubans are playing the aussies right now, and it is tied 2-2 in the bottom of the sixth with two on two out and a full count. i can get into this.
but it is really the setting that brings it all together. toronto, ontario, canada is an incredible place. the stereotype is that the people are really nice, and while this certainly proves true in some cases, it isn't pervasive. "courteous" and "thoughtful" are more accurate. this is still a big big city, but the underlying interactions of its inhabitants result in a populace that leads a less stressful atmosphere. human beings are very fickle creatures, and slight changes in environment undoubtedly have occasionally far-reaching influences. obviously, i'm on vacation, and away from some cares people at home here aren't. but from where i'm standing, this is a place with all of the upsides and opportunities of a major city in this region of the world and but missing a lot of the downsides of many different other places. this is a marvelous city.
and the aussies just pulled ahead. if you are into names that begin with "y" you should really see the wbc cuban baseball team roster (which is sadly missing yunieski bentancourt - perfect combo) also witness the pants of the cuban team. yeah, it is always like that. they have hit three batters this inning, and should cut that out. the thing is, you can do a good job of "accidentally" hitting someone with a pitch, whereas you cannot "accidentally" charge the mound like richie sexson.
anyway, enough baseball for a moment. let me say something about curling. the most important curling tournament in canada is also playing right now. i like just about everything about it. it is inexplicably called the brier. it is sponsored by tim horton's. they have an ad that is funny enough but still makes some sense and they play it enough but it isn't overdone. the teams are determined by nationwide competitions that go as low as different groups of clubs within the same small town. this is totally possible with games that are not very strenuous and have teams of four. i think it is pretty easy to learn the rules of a game that has simple basics while you watch it and have rules references in front of you. there are some pretty good terms. let's go stack the brooms, eh. can't quite tell if they got a biter there or not. this is our favorite dude, who yells incomprehensibly (in an extremely quebecois manner) whenever his team is curling. martin crete, ladies and gentlemen: "I'd like to think I'm passionate and I'm loud," Howard said in a break from covering the curling chorus from the broadcast booth at the Canadian men's curling championship. "I know I sound annoying to a lot of people. "I've had many older people come up to me and say, 'You're the reason they invented the mute button.' "

"Martin Crete? He's a little aggressive," Alberta lead Ben Hebert said after Monday morning's 7-4 victory over Saskatchewan's Pat Simmons.

"Just today, I was in the hack on one of Jean-Michel's shots. Martin was losing his mind, so I just sat there and waited a couple of seconds. Usually, it doesn't bother me at all, but that was a little over the top.

"I don't know what he's yelling. I think he just yells, 'Ah' as loud as he can. His girlfriend must get an earful."

once you understand the game, it is kind of like the love child of pool and bowling. there is a ton of great strategy, gameplay is very deliberate, and it is totally relaxed to play. it has been great to have it on to fill gaps and often because it is not tough to play a few games a day. i really really want to try it.

even if you don't like sports, some things are just cool as cultural institutions. that is certainly the quality of the hockey hall of fame. this was like a museum/shrine. the sign says welcome to the cathedral of hockey. i don't know french, but the french version of that sign uses the same word as it does in the translation of just plain "hockey all of fame". it seemed a little silly until i got inside: it is a house not simply of artifacts, but relics. i had a friggin blast, but the cup would have been worth it all on its own. it is in an extremely own building that was once the bank of montreal location. the kind of place that has a sweet vault. but it isn't like a bank, it is like a train station mixed with a church. the atmosphere is hushed. no one speak loud when they are near the cup. i think the best friggin stained glass ever might have something to do with that. the main thing is that unlike almost every other much revered comparable item, you get to touch the stanley cup. the real friggin thing. it makes the trip a true pilgrimage. really an incredible and indellible experience.

more to say than there is time to say it, and that makes it a great trip.

classic

2009-03-07T21:40:00.000-08:00

i am in toronto to watch a bunch of baseball because it is spring break and there is the second world baseball classic which had cheap tickets. toronto, as everyone probably knows, is an awful lot like america but it is much nicer in some ways. the world baseball classic is major league baseball's attempt to grow global interest in the game and hold an international tournament similar to the world cup. this is the beginning of the competition, where teams are playing in pools of four. the countries in the pool here in toronto are the us, canada, venezuela, and italy. two teams emerge from each group, and the us and venezuela were heavily favored in this one. oh wait, i'm in canada, they were favoured. anyway, the games today were us/canada and venezuela/italy, in that order.
the us/canada game was of course viewed as a huge deal. there are a decent number of talented canadian players, but as the competition is somewhat fledgling, it doesn't draw all the marquee names that any of the teams involved might boast, including the states. last time around, the canadians did beat the us, adding some steam to a game that was already pretty significant in toronto. the games were at the rogers center, which is enormous. the size of the venue is breathtaking from the outside, as it has a retractable dome that adds more height to an already generously sized arena (it ordinarily houses the baseball team and the argonauts, the canadian football league team - canadian football needs a very large field, bigger than american). so this large stadium was totally packed out, and mostly with canada fans, but there were a lot of americans too. the interesting thing was that despite the tense atmosphere and the obvious passion of the fans, there was little to no jawing between opposing supporters. the game itself was absolutely amazing and extremely competitive. there were a lot of home runs. in fact, i think it was the only way the us scored at all. maybe not quite. it was not much different from the way the tigers play, speaking of which, there were a lot of detroit fans there, not too surprising given proximity and the glut of representatives on the venezuelan roster. at the end of the game, the canadians were behind by one with a runner on second and a great player batting. the count worked to full, followed by a couple of foul balls. needless to say, this was pretty tense. the ball was hit hard into play, and with the dowmed roof it was difficult to gauge how far it might go, but it dropped into middle right field and was caught to end the game. good times.
the venezuela/italy game was much different. whereas the the us/canada match was expected to be competitive if not as close as it was, everyone was quite certain venezuela would crush and perhaps mercy the italians. also, toronto is not in or near either of those two countries. however, there were a lot of venezuelans in for the game, which was great to see. their fans brought a great atmosphere, sort of the world cup feel i am sure baseball would like to achieve: lots of country colors, face paint, silly hats, various percussion instruments, good chanting. if you make it from venezuela to canada, you are probably pretty serious about this stuff. as for italy, well, not the same sort of presence, but a respectable amount of canadians of italian heritage showing support, bringing some flags and such. the italians batted first, and things started out as expected. before the third out, though, the italians got a couple hits but didn't push anything across. good enough for the venezuelans as they set in to their strength, hitting. the second batter cranked a ball to the gap in deep right, and my thought was well, here we go. the right fielder, however, had different ideas, and hustled his best, but it didn't look like he would get it. he made a great dive and made a shocking catch, quieting the vociferous venezuela supporters. it was totally a game-changer, as for the next few innings the italians looked a lot better than the venezuelans. despite much threatening, however, no runs were scored. eventually, things shook down more or less as expected and venezuela won like 7-0 or something, but that it happened is not as important as how it happened.
the story of the significance begins a couple years ago, with the aforementioned detroit tigers. the tigers, while showing some great stretches over the last couple years, have had little luck with their relief pitching. one of the lowlights of the tiger bullpen recently was a man by the name of jason grilli. although he was born in america, the world baseball classic rules allow him to play for italy because his parents or grandparents moved to the states from there. although there have been several terrible tiger relievers over the last couple years, and probably a couple are in this tournament, jason grilli was markedly one of the worst, and has become somewhat of a representative joke between myself and my buddy from law school who went to grand valley. he also has a disdain for italians based on his experiences in rome and greater italy this past summer, and so on the way up here i was making jokes about getting him a game-worn jason grilli jersey. before then, it was always an autographed one or something along those lines. point is, we hate jason grilli, have hated him for a while, and have had several conversations about how terrible of a pitcher he is. the tigers did trade him away last season, and jim leyland was forced into talking about why, and talked some great smack on grilli. basically, this is one of our favorite dudes to dog. he showed up in a bunch of promos because he is one person on their roster who has flawless english, and we boo him every time they show him on the screen, and we booed him when they announced him on the roster, and so on. so the game is headed into the fifth or six, the italian starter has held the powerhouse venezuelans scoreless, and we see grilli is warming up in the bullpen, and sure enough, they bring him in. we boo him when he is announced. he warms up a little and the inning begins; the first batter is carlos guillen, former contemporary of jason grilli in detroit, but unlike jason grilli, a player worth having around, good hitter, some good skills in the field, not a superstar power hitter, but a solid daily guy. grilli delivers, and it is high and outside, not a close pitch, not a good pitch. grilli throws again, and guillen sees it well and gets all of it, sending it well over the left field wall. two pitches, and grilli gives up a home run to a guy who rarely hits them, and things begin to unravel from there. grilli gets a little help from his defense on the next ball in play, and then serves up back to back walks. despite being one of the few major leaguers on the roster, grilli has quickly run to the end of his manager's patience, and gets yanked. venezuela scores three more times, and the batters grilli walked are charged to him and he gets the loss on the night. grilli finishes with a era of 81. if you don't know what that means, it means he is fucking awful and was completely useless. in a bizarre way, it totally made my night. i'm having a great time, and i don't expect that to stop tomorrow with the highly anticipated us/venezuela tilt.

in which i review the shit out of chinese democracy

2008-11-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

i love the leading off with "in which" and i decided to snag that one, thanks to my sister and i think someone else a little while ago and the beginning of the let it be album. i've been giving chinese democracy a lot of thought since the most recent and finally true release information came out. hope i don't jinx it somehow, since it hasn't technically been released yet. i like guns and roses just fine, but they are not exactly my favorite of all time. i think they squandered what they had in a lot of instances. but they also made some pretty damn good music. enough to make me pretty curious about what axl rose would do over the course of fifteen years with a small army of sometimes bandmates. they're streaming it now, and i'm not doing much, and i was mostly unsatisfied with the reviews i've read thus far. so i am going to review it myself. probably favorably. if you do not want to hear a lot about chinese democracy, do not read this. or for a fun trick, imagine all references to the title of the release refer to the notion of democracy in china. don't forget your free doctor pepper.
starts out epically enough by building with ambient noise and gradually crescendoing unintelligable speaking? deliberate note-by-note guitar lead in before dropping into super heavy riff and an old school axl howl. starts off with pantera-esque bombast, giving way to prevalent overdubs of axl over himself in his upper end of the range. the rocking guitar is enough to carry this track on its own, although it seems to shift a lot, i am assuming different people played parts for this one. but hot damn. the song is satisfying overall, even if most of it sounds like late 90s metal acts (the ones not flirting with rap stylings) that had obvious g n r influences and a sick lead guitarist.
i guess the next one has been out for a while, and it is pretty grating at first blush. it sounds like it wants to grind along like something that could keep background, but then decides to assert itself rather intensely again. this one is a little over the top but not in a funny yet totally awesome way like the finest gunners stuff, just kind of silly, screams pay attention to me. there are a lot of abrupt changes, and now the sort of barked vocal noises are more like the awesome stuff i was references. but it has to change again and end the monkey noises, and just goes in reverse like it had started out. a definite listening experience, intriguing if not entirely pleasurable to hear.
things slow down at start out with a sort of trippy drum track and vocals. things snap together into a lean riffing mid-tempo rocker that trudges on methodically before predictably once again giving away dramatically and cranking it up to eleven. this is really my kind of track at some points, and it seems like axl might have actually been paying attention to the world around him and not just what he already had. i like that he managed to pick up some influences of major-league indie rock (not an oxymoron, i say). overall, my favorite track so far.
ballad time, which for axk means piano plinking time. i can dig that. stays pretty low key for a while before going monster ballad style. pretty old school right here. the strings come in to complete the scene. crunching riff and a guitar solo that doesn't soar quite as high as it could or should, no reason not to sustain the notes on something like this. it goes all the right places, but there are way better solos in this set, and that would have been prime time for one that was wasted alongside another elsewhere on the record. false ending, oh hell yes. almost makes the guitar fail forgivable, this is what i love about this band, epic cheese and unashamed. great structure to that track.
next one starts out with some flamenco guitar over electronica drum machines before a funk riff and strings (why now?) kick in. very strange stuff, axl trying to move in new direction is interesting. i hate to say it, but chuck kobesaw was totally right about this song. he said it sounds like a late pierce brosnan-era bond film both titularly and musically: "if the world". this is the counterpart to when the smashing pumpkins tried their hand with electronica influences for that batman and robin movie around that time. so while it is an update on gnr, it is not really current. total gorillaz moment there, sounds good but also dated and derivitive. it is not bad, just kind of forced indutrial sounding.
next one kicks off with some choir and then jerks into something that sounds like the backbone of a mid-tempo rap song. things shift into ballad mode again, and once again there is a lot of muscle backing it. this is some classic axl singing. there are some strange samples kind of muffled in the background, chalk that up partially to streaming from myspace i guess. kind of dragging a little before getting to the guitar solo, this one is more appropriately sonorous, if a little mournful, appropriate for the melancholy lyrics. everything comes together for a while before another solo, this one more of the bitchin' variety. things get pretty extreme here as they really rock it out, very well-orchestrated. incredible guitar part, really letting it all go. the conclusion is exactly what is expected, and does not disappoint at all for what it should be, and bring that choir back to finish things up.
another plodding rocker with a desparate, dramatic feel. this song would probably be much more appealing in a different place in the order, but at least the synthetic drums elements aren't present three times in a row. more good to great guitar work, enough to spare. this song is a somewhat definite member of a species, and a fine specimen at that, but out of its natural habitat. the listen begins to take on a little bit of an indulgent feel at this point. i must say the piano playing is right on and the guitar remains a respectful distance at appropriate times. this song is like a mountain without a peak, carrying a lot of weight and considerable height but it doesn't lead to anything in particular since it tries to be the big punch everytime the music shifts.
this starts out with some positively ridiculous vocal exercizes, almost an r&b kind of a thing but with an awful lot of axl. the guitar is menacing but immediately loses its effect as a result of the high-pitched response backup vocals and becomes merely cartoonish. once those go away, this goes back to the late 90s power metal feel and does do a great job of it, yet remains consistent with the proto-version of the sound the band named the same thing these guys are using did early in its career. predictably, the backup vocals return for the refrain. i don't really care for most things that come of as trying to be anthematic, and this song crosses the line at certain points. if i spent fifteen years on this song, i think i would realize that the lyrics sounded a little ludicrous even by gunners cheese standards. don't try and stop you axl? don't worry about it. we all wanted that dr. pepper.
this doesn't sound like axl at all at first, or like gnr for that matter. axl just did something really really weird with his voice there. slow tune but not a ballad. wait for it, you know it is coming... psychedelic rock out. the whole thing is like some perverse interpretation of late-era beatles and its descendents up to and including the turn of the century. yet another stylistic element comes into play with a notably bluesy guitar solo. the song takes on a very comfortable feel, a more resigned angst than the bitter nervousness that gives some gnr material its edge. this is like a take on alice in chains, and it works out well overall. still, a lot going on and some parts are better than others.
brooding opening, tries to be spooky and then spacy before picking up a dancy feel for a moment. more vocal shenanigans before any lyrics. another abrupt change here, another strange electronic noise there. rocking out pretty hard for the most part, a song that lurches between classic driving guns and roses and iron maiden filler album cuts. those vocal shenanigans return, and it sounds like he is almost trying to do his own immigrant song thing. fortunately, guitars to the rescue. pretty sweet, sounds like something zakk wylde might play.
classic rock time, and they do it up right and proper. there is a fine line between a feel-good song you just want to sing along to and trying to be anthematic, and axl gets it right this time around. i don't know the words yet, but i am considering learning them and ordering a whiskey and putting this on a jukebox somewhere for a good time. not that i would really be able to keep up with some of the screeching axl does here. i really wonder when that part of the vocal track dates to. this one is a highlight for me, but there isn't any real ending to it, which is unfortunate, i wouldn't have been opposed to another false ending in all honesty.
horns first, then strings on top of it. once again, it is unclear who is even singing here. it is the same person always, but it wavers between sounding like axl rose sounds and sounding like no one else ever has sounded. kind of strange. things slow back down but not too far. more mechanical-sounding drums drive a steady pace, and things culminate with the guitar paired along more samples from cool hand luke and something else, i don't know. the strings add some bravado at the right time but then put things back to where they came from after a brief rock-out. for some reason this track seems like it should be the last one on the record. it is just that kind of a song. not bad, not the greatest all the time, but really good when you want to hear it. when you don't want to hear it you can be pretty comfortable about ending the listen there, and that is why it should be last. anytime you sample martin luther king jr, that is just something that should finish things. this one fades out the way it should but the final strings flourish is a little unnecessary.
this is not a cool ballad right now. painful axl. too much, even the piano isn't doing it for me right now. predictable strings. the soft music just makes axl seem that much more piercing. this is one of those times he should stay down in the range. the mandatory guitar solo is quality but restrained.
the final cut is not as good as the song that should have ended the album, but it does have that same the record finishes here feel. the two songs are relatively disparate, but they accomplish the same feel in different ways. this one almost seems even more deliberately crafted for that regard. makes sense, if you're going to spend fifteen years on something and keep it from sprawling out of control, presumably you also have an interest in some album-craft to the point of specific beginning and closing songs. this is a long, dramatic, choreographed farewell sequence. it serves its purpose well. personally, i was so ready to say goodbye at the twelth track that i am more than ready to do so with this one. it was, however, good to me.
all of these songs are really full of ideas and the 15 years thing makes some sense. i think he could have made just as good of a record, and bizarrely as cohesive, if he just spread things out instead of trying to do too much at once. this could have wound up like the white album. being what it is, chinese democracy stands even less of a chance of a fair review than just about anything else in some time.
people almost always approach any given thing with the sum of their life's experiences in relation to whatever the context is. lots of things factor in, and just about all of them, at the end of the day, are opinions. the point is, a lot of people have a lot of opinions about this record before they have even heard it. it works that way for everything, but in this instance, those opinions are particularly strong among certain segments of the population, namely just about everyone who has any interest in hearing a guns and roses album that was fifteen years in the making and is made up of basically axl rose and a bunch of other dudes who are not recognized for their extensive credits on previous studio material under the name guns and roses. those are just a few of the aspects that make people inclined to either want to love or loathe this record.
music is by its nature a very subjective thing, but the people interested in chinese democracy can probably agree on a few basic things. axl rose has previously been involved with quality studio material. he is, whatever else one might say about him, a reasonably talented individual. fifteen years is a lot of time to spend working on a single release. there are therefore bound to be at least some good points about chinese democracy.
all that aside, people have several reasons to know how they want to feel about this music before they have even heard it. admittedly, i wanted to like it. i also wanted to appraoch it as objectively as possible, but it just doesn't work like that. music is a language that doesn't function as one. this is why everyone has different ipods and pandora stations, and moreso why you'll always skip something on someone else itunes library or especially why your carefully whittled internet radio station eventually plays something you have no interest in hearing or downright detest. the pandora thing is based on the objective elements, and sometimes they just do not add up right at all.
this is not too far off from what is going on with chinese democracy. axl has an established palette to draw from, but he adds to it appropriately for the most part. the occasional offending elements are certainly present, but most of the time, this record is actually precisely what it should be considering the incubation and perfectionism. it has its own relative spectrum of good and bad. as a whole, though, this is really pretty good music. everything on chinese democracy is well-crafted if a little too deliberate at times. it deserves to be listened to closely. i just wrote down my first impressions and certainly went back for more. if you think you would like something like what was described above, this will be worth checking out. if you don't like guns and roses, of course you won't like it. if you think fifteen years means it will be the best album ever, you won't like it. if you just want to listen to a strange record some time, you might like it.

i heart google ads

2008-11-19T18:22:00.000-08:00

i did find something to do yesterday after that blog post. it was quite an adventure, but it is not the story i intend to tell at this time. right now, all i want to say is:
(link) Supreme Court
Browse a huge selection now. Find exactly what you want today.
www.ebay.com

hot dog

2008-11-18T10:18:00.001-08:00

oh man i just ate a couple of pretty excellent hot dogs. on par with epic sandwiches? not quite. it is, after all, a hot dog. however, this has been a breakthrough in its own realm. this was achieved with the assistance of the achewood cookbook. a number of small but important adjustments make all the difference. first of all, toasting the bun. this is very simple and absolutely key. also, cooking in a little bit of water in a frying pan. this is probably the ideal way of heating the dog, very even and undamaging. typically all i really care about on a hotdog is ketchup; other things seem to get in the way of this basic enjoyment. i do like onions, but you never need a whole onion's worth of onion for a hot dog or two. fortunately, roommates with the assist. the fridge had half a small red onion (still only needed a couple slices), some dank mustard and crucial relish. this was truly the budget gormet, and having the little things required in small amounts on hand makes all the difference. i have not felt this good about eating a hot dog in some time. i mean, yesterdog is good, but it has been a long time and also i still recall that one almost never feels good about eating yesterdog.
the whole hot dog thing started with a conversation a couple days ago that dwelled on them for a while, although i cannot recall the exact point of the conversation. i awoke the next morning with an acute desire to eat a hot dog. i thought about it for a second and decided that was a silly thought. after a while i realized the craving had been ignited by that conversation and that i still wanted a hot dog. after about four hours i decided that i really truly did want a hot dog and would probably be pretty satisfied if i had one. it isn't a huge investment, after all, and they make for reasonably priced personal food units. and so i did indeed purchase hot dogs to sate myself and i thought it hit the spot. i must say that the much-desired albeit overly and unevenly microwaved and ketchup-slathered object possessed a very small fraction of the crude culinary delight i have just experienced.
the point is, sometimes the little things kill, and sometimes the little things never let you down, never run around and desert you. if you have also gone some time without a hotdog, you should probably have one. a delicious one. that goes double if you are a vegetarian. no matter who you are, do it for taste. do it for america. do it for freedom.
sweet jesus, did i just write a blog post about hotdogs and close out with references to bush and rick astley? i should probably go do something.

breaking news

2008-11-17T20:05:00.000-08:00

i am not up to a whole lot. very little, in fact. just wanted to keep you posted. in non-news:
exams are drawing perilously near. i have not been over-committed to concerning myself with them, but we are approaching the point where there is just too much ambient angsting to ignore around the school. in that environment, the worst things thrive and multiply. this is one of the many reasons i do not like to study there. there is so much anxiety and fear-mongering and even the inoculated succumb to the pandemic. i'm doing my best though. i'm not going to buy any fucking flash cards. all answers will be in the book. i already bought that. these people go through life solving problems by throwing money at them. i try to solve most problems by doing nothing. recent studies suggest that the two approaches have a nearly identical success rate. both of course fail when compared to logical, well-reasoned courses of action. that being said, i think logical inactions result from the preferred method more often than monetary transactions do. the takeaway comfort here is that, in law school at least, i am confident that i am just as well off as those poor souls oozing stress and returning that unique and putrid scent to the bunker we call a school. i don't know if it is them or flooding or something dead in the heating system anymore. however, the proximity of actual events does demand some attention that may or may not be forthcoming, as remains to be seen.
and just a little more law school: this morning i had the misfortune to sit by people before class. these were the sorts referred to above. amid other exam bitching, a girl mentions that she "doesn't get" why explanations for answers are an essential part of law school exams. after all, if she knows the answer, why should she ever need to understand it? just like math, she says: if she can write down the correct answer, why should a showing of methodology be demanded? foolishness, but a basic sort. this is only the set-up, though. then she adds that professors should assume she possesses requisite understanding if she has a correct answer because, of course, "i'm already in law school, they don't let idiots in here." shoot me now, folks.
just a little more law school: that one girl i used to complain about and may or may not have labelled as my personal nemesis? i have a class with her this year again. as it turns out, she is not so bad. not entirely unpleasant to talk with. really a pretty alright human being. i do not know which of us changed much, if either or both, but i suspect it is largely perception. although i swear she was a real bitch last year. we're not going to be best friends forever or anything, but she is a friendly acquaintance at this point.
not law school: i am currently sporting a moustache i must say i feel pretty good about. the beard is not entirely gone because for one thing, i didn't want it to be, and for another thing, that would require a razor that i do not own and do not wish to purchase. so basically i trimmed everything pretty far down except the moustace. the ends are curled up and kind of point toward my nose, as they can't quite complete the full circle yet. with a little more length or a bit of murray's, this should be doable. it is pretty silly, but also pretty old school. it goes well with the notorious h.a.t.. the best explaination so far is that i look like other a prospector or haberdasher. also, take that, law school. hah, snuck it in there on you.
pandora is treating me pretty well these days on jimi hendrix radio. the cool thing about pandora isn't always so much discovering a new artist with more than one song you dig or a deep cut from a favorite as much as it is hearing music you know and love but do not get to hear very often and wish you had purchased back when you bought a ton of music. the kind of albums a friend has and you always meant to get a copy of and never did. music you knew you like but had no idea how much.
recently made a christmas list. strange exercise, really. i'm not sure what it says about someone, but a collection of twelve or so items that one would enjoy but not necessarily independently purchase says something. it was also bizarre to put it together as a series of hyperlinks. a good thing, really, as there are more things available through the internet than any physical place in the world on its own. i do not understand how dhl fucked up in an era where so many things are shipped, but that is neither here nor there. i was able to suggest something that doesn't even exist in the specific form, and there is some mystical appeal to personalization these days. people have commissioned things for a long time, and this is simpler, but i think the appeal is somewhat similar.
finished that riddley walker book a while ago. very thought-provoking. my preferred kind of fiction, good story with lots of hazy metaphor and playing with language. the style forces you to constantly think and interpret and makes for slow going, but is ultimately fairly rewarding. if you don't like the idea of reading a book with everything spelled unconventionally, then you should probably make sure you do not read this book. if the concept doesn't bother you and you enjoy literature from when people still worried about nuclear war a whole bunch, this comes highly recommended.
the heater is finally kicking on. it has turned cold here, but no snow yet by any means. allegedly some shall fall soon, but i remain skeptical about its significance. i actually kind of want to see some snow fall though, and might even go outside and look. in any event, i am sure i will see enough when i go peninsula stlye. yeah, i went there. should be back on or around a week before christmas, and for a while. looking forward to seeing everyone.

tonight is a good night i think for updating neglected blogs

2008-11-10T20:33:00.000-08:00

if you are picking up what i am putting down that is good and we are friends. if you are not, we are friends and you should spend more time with your friends at qwantz.com, official home of always making me laugh on the internet. i believe i have mentioned this previously, but i also believe that it bears repeating.
what have i been doing? the same things i normally do. i have been remiss in relating many adventures of the past month or whatever it has been. some of these adventures: philly won that world series, there was some dancing in the streets. they had a parade on a day that also happened to be halloween. i wore a milk crate on my head most of that day in the crude semblance of a costume. i did the same thing at night that i did last year and chronicled in this space and it seems like a lot of time has passed. i went to go see rocky horror picture show as a stage production. my friend was frank n furter and he showed up just about everybody else by being fucking amazing. another friend was also in the production and i was unaware of that until he emerged as rocky from the lab table wearing very very little. i taught my buddy how to brew beer. despite my repetition of the fact, he was still amazed at the ease of the process. i went to baltimore and hung out with mando and the dwy. we went here. there was good beer and delicious garlic-rosemary fries. that man who speaks eloquently and raises hell of funds won a contest that night too. i assume the people who live in this house around the corner (across from the old place) from me were pretty excited. seriously, click that link and look around. i promise that one will not barackroll you.anyway, i probably did some other stuff over that month that was fun too but is not presently springing to mind.
law school is still law school. i don't know if i hate it less than i used to or if i just hate it differently. i choose classes now and i feel like maybe i could do some kind of lawyering perhaps someday, i don't know. trademarks are pretty alright. there are still a lot of unpleasant people to be around though and i do not feel like i am engaging with things too much or even like i could if i just tried a little harder. it is less fun now because one of my best friends is not going anymore. i mean, the people i am friends with at law school share my distaste for the ordeal, but we are mostly talk and stuff. but she is gone and it is kind of different not having one of five people i am actually friends with not be there anymore. but she lives close by now. i can't blame her for doing what she is doing and i do not know if i wish i could or not.
i have not been forced to leave my current housing due to lack of respect or anything else. i like living here and i think i do better when i have people around. my hope of working more and harder because i lived alone mostly just resulted in being lonely and having a lot of trouble getting out of bed for like anything except class. i wonder what will happen in a year when some of my friends here say they will move to portland. i would like to move to portland maybe. it seems to be a pretty common sentiment among the people i know and spend time with. but i have things to do here. nobody knows what will happen ever.
i have had some pretty exceptional brews over the last month too. victory's hop wallop is out again and you should enjoy some of that. i found founders harvest ale and i was happy to find it and happier to sip it. weyerbacher's fresh hop was also top notch. i must say i was not overwhlemed by that magic hat you kids have been extolling, the fall brown whatever it was. it was okay. i look forward to tring the winter odd notion. roxy rolles is out again too. i cannot recall if i mentioned that imperial pumpkin ale or not. if you ask and also say nice things to me i might bring one for you for christmas. it is pretty remarkable. the real revelation in the world of brew for me over this past stretch has been some heady cans. i knew oskar blues' dale's pale ale pretty well, the ultimate beer for events where you can bring beer but not in glass. that could not have prepared me for the big fat malt fest of old chub scotch ale (watch out old founders dirty bastard) or the sticky hoppy nirvana of gordon. i do not know why these folks wanted to do the can thing; they do not need a gimmick.
i have been enjoying the musical stylings of band of horses. as usual, i am not at the forefront or anything, but those guys are pretty frigging good man. i have a fever and the only cure is more reverb on the vocals. i get the my morning jacket comparisons and i like both but i hear some pretty significant differences. horses have put out much less material and thus it seems to me like they are more consistently good, but that is because my pandora keeps playing obscure primitive mmj tracks. i have also been digging on modest mouse and do not think their most recent album is quite as bad as everyone else does. also on the music front, tea leaf green is playing a lot of shows pretty close by but not in the city. i am pretty frustrated because i can't seem to find a way to any of these gigs. hopefully something will give; i have to believe there are other people on the internet who are making at least the short trip to lancaster, if not stroudsburg and towson. i am listening to the most recent philly show and i still recall it as one of the best nights of my whole life.
i feel like i haven't really gotten much on the table here, and yet the whole typing is kind of cathartic. questions or comments? please fill out a survey card and put it in the box.

timesuck

2008-09-26T22:41:00.000-07:00

so i have been wasting time all over the interwebs (int0rwabs? teh? the gore? i just don't know anymore), pretty much everywhere but here. this has, however, led to some maintenance (can never spell that one right; i swear i tried it that way already) of the links section. so here is your shocking update: the comic linked under 'funny' has been removed because it has not really been funny at all recently. boo to that, so i dealt the site the crushing blow of removing it from my links. it has been replaced with another one, though, of course. this other one is somewhat reminiscent of dinosaur comics (which should really be moved to funniest) but there are some differences. the artistic concepts (although this one changes every time) and humor are along the same lines. also added a link to my sister's new blog that she is writing from the land of thai chili crisps, a.k.a. england. she is a super good writer and this is a great chance for you to learn everything you wanted to know about libraries in london (and some other stuff) but were afraid to ask. check it out.
in addition to tons and tons of stuff i have learned about that no one else would care to hear about, i recently turned up one item that is probably of fairly pervasive interest: npr's website will stream the new dylan album for the week leading up to its release, starting september 30th. i'm sure plenty of people knew that already, but either way, i think it is pretty cool. this is a perfect thing to have streamed because it is something that has the opportunity to be really good or er, not, and plenty of people are going to purchase it anyway.
as i mentioned earlier, my sister has departed to a place across the ocean with confusing signage. before she left, there was a send-off soiree at her place where i had a good time. while many people show up to these sorts of things with somewhat convoluted connections, i always seem to be a little out of place despite the gene pool thing. in any event, this party was also talk like a pirate day, so i made grog. i thought grog was just rum and hot water, but there is other stuff in it like sugar, citrus juice, cinnamon and cloves. in fact that is all the other stuff that is in it. it comes out kind of like mulled wine. kept it warm with a rice cooker which did the trick splendidly. however, there were an awful lot of bevarages present and not all of it got consumed during the party. it sat around at my place for a couple days until a few of us were up late drinking and ran out of beer. this led to the invention of quite a delicious drink combining about equal parts grog and a iced tea/lemonade mix. pretty diluted at that point, but also entirely delicious. i do not know if letting things sit about for a day or two has any effect though, and we decided we should probably make it again and find out.
the next night brought a crab feast, which was pretty frigging awesome. the whole idea got started because we took on an additional roommate for a couple months, a friend of a current roommate who wanted to get out of baltimore. so this guy is coming up from maryland, and the idea is to have him bring up a bushel of live large blue crabs. we will wait here for him and drink beers and get things going in the afternoon. well he was late out of the gate, and upon attempted purchase of crabs discovered that prices had skyrocketed and the desired type of crab was not even available. fuck that, we said. what wound up happening was many phone calls resulting in a lengthy expedition into the northern part of the city and a savings of roughly eighty dollars. the girl who drove actually left before we even got the crabs cooked though! i felt bad. fortunately, we had copious amounts of boulder brewing's 'hazed and infused' which is a quality beer that is ideal for protracted good times such as a crab feast. somewhere between a pale and an ipa in terms of bitterness, with a svelte body that makes for smooth and easy drinkability, especially combined with the overall refreshing floral character. a good time was had by all.
speaking of baltimore, i found myself there again the other weekend. i was in exactly the same part of town that i had been to before for the kinetic sculpture race. at first i was surprised, but when i thought about i realized that the sorts of things that would draw me to go down there would probably be in the same general vicinity. checked out the american visionary arts museum, which was very intruiging but kind of small. it looked like there would be more from the outside. the outside is almost as good as some of the stuff in there though. to be fair, one of the floors in the main building was closed for the instillation of an upcoming exhibit, and we got discount admission. still, the permenant collection just wasn't as expansive as i assumed it might be. size aside, that stuff was really really cool. the artist bios are also a lot more interesting than the typical fare. the idea with the museum is that everything it has comes from entirely formally untrained artists. so there were some pretty crazy people who had stuff in there, and it was pretty nifty. the set-up of the museum is also a refreshing change of pace, three different buildings with different layouts and purposes. i think i would have been a lot more blown away by it had i not seen so much of the cool stuff outside when i was there before, but it was still worth exploring fully.
the real reason to go to baltimore was for a concert, though. we had a bit of a tough time finding the venue, which turned out to be a little embarrasing. it was at this place called the pier six pavillion, right, but all the stuff around had signs for what was on pier five or four or whatever. we had no problem finding those piers. but we were trying to hard to follow directions instead of common sense that says pier six is probably not too far away from pier five. oh well, we found it with time to spare.
i was unaware that the first band was even going to be on the bill. they were called [someone's name, justin something?] and the driving rain. pretty innocuous and a little bland, but very adherent to solid americana rock and roll. mid-tempo country rock with a lot of organ. the guy played whatever he had through a leslie, and that sounded pretty damn good. frontman could sing. just nothing i could get all up in arms about. kind of reminded me of the wallflowers.
i was not there to see a band of that description. rather, i was there to see the avett brothers, who i have been raving about and constantly listening to ever since i got talked into riding along to a free show of theirs in pittsburgh a few months back. they did not disappoint. i don't think they could if they wanted to; it is just not in them. it was a much different experience to be intimately familiar with the catalog this time around. spent more time being pumped about what was being played than looking around and enjoying myself but a little of unsure about how incredibly excited everyone around me was. great show, could tell the guys were a little tired but giving it every once of energy they had, and the crowd was just wild the whole time, couldn't get enough and couldn't calm down, although people were impressively respectful during quieter numbers. seems like this band is always on tour, and i cannot stress enough how worthwhile it would be to get into this band through a live show or any sort of recording. let me know if you need something, seriously.
despite the unbridled enthusiasm of the crowd for the avetts, they were not the headliner at this show. that would be the drive-by truckers. i feel like most people who should be into this band already are, but if you've enver heard them you probably should. some serious southern-fried guitar orgy balls to the wall rock. it was really good live and loud as fuck. they played their asses off too. one of the three guitar players spent a decent chunk of time on the pedal steel, and i can never get enough of that. their backdrop had some things on either side that looked like demonic swans. i am not sure what was up with that, but whatever. let there be rock, indeed. all together, it was a great show at a chill venue in a beautiful setting; an ideal combination. saw some wire-status parts of the city on the meaner out, just to keep things interesting. and then there was the ride. i like rides. that was a good day.
i know today is supposed to be friday night or whatever, but i'm totally just going to sit around and watch the debate. i don't know why; i usually don't bother. kind of curious, and it is one of those things it feels nice to have one's own interpretation and understanding of. i'm sure plenty of people i know here are going to go out and watch it. to me, going to a bar seems like the worst possible idea. no good can come of that.
in fact, as i was writing about this, one of my roommates said goodbye. i asked where she was going. to the bar to watch the debate, of course. but apparently she is watching it in a semi-private room with some organized group of obama supporters. as long as your someplace where you can avoid a fight, you're alright. i don't feel like that is real likely a lot of places i would go to. freedom, terra, etc.

hat

2008-09-15T15:49:00.000-07:00

i am currently wearing a hat. this is not a normal thing for me. figured i would give it a shot. it is kind of weird to see it in reflections. i have tucked all of my hair under it in an effort to simulate to some degree my appearance without all of that hair. kind of livable. but i think i would need to keep the hat. maybe i can get used to this. it is not an ordinary style of hat. sort of like engineer style. the main issue is that it is maroon and sort of clashes with a lot of what i own. oh well. it is only a hat.
in addition to acquiring said hat, the last few days have not been lacking in activity and amusement, due in large part to a visit from my mother, her mother, and a family friend. although the visit was on short notice and consequently of some stress, a good time was had by most if not all.
i got to go to a play. i like plays and i rarely see them because i have not made it enough of a priority. unfortunate as that may be, it made it that much nicer to see one again. it was about joe hill, who was an early folk singer and iww union organizer. sounds like a pretty solid guy. it was a one man show, which was impressive because it was well-executed. the guy sang very well and played the banjo and accordion adequately. overall i thought it was a strange show for my family to select but i rather enjoyed it. some pretty cool theater trickery, excellent use of a minimal set, and a thought-out design of the set in the first place made it a solid experience.
the next night we were supposed to go see a baseball game, but it got rained out. instead, we went and ate a bunch of delicious food. it was sort of tapas-style, and highlights included a barbeque chicken quesedilla, calamari, cheese steak eggroll, and a thoroughly decent shiraz. this also marked the first time i have visibly prayed in a restaurant in as long as i can remember. afterwords we got gelato. if you enjoy ice cream and have not had gelato, do not eat gelato. it is exponentially superior and you may find it difficult to settle for inferior frozen dairy desserts after experiencing the rich, savory wonders of gelato.
i also went to a small-scale neighborhood music festival sort of a thing the other night. it was supposed to start at like four or something and i knew roughly five people wou were sure they were going to be there. well, of course nobody else went when i did, for various reasons. that was acceptable. kicked around the park it was at for a while. nice little place, as much a garden as a park, really. it was up in a neighborhood that has been hip for some time, and as a result the only people other than me at the park toward the beginning were parents with children who were not older than three or so. there were several of these units and then me, and also the few people who had something to do with the festival. i am always open to hearing new music, especially live, especially free, but admittedly the strongest draw of the even came from the alleged offer of free beer with purchase of ten dollar cup. and not shitty free beer either; i thought it was going to be yard's but it turned out to be pbc. those guys are pretty good too. the thing was, as the event got rolling with the speed and grace of a two-toed sloth, no beer was being poured. there was a setup for it, brought by a large truck covered in the brewery's regalia. there were people to serve it. but something wasn't right. i didn't want to be the one person hassling the people who were there to serve beer and not serving it, as there had to be some sort of a real problem to keep absolutely everybody on the scene from not even having a beer. and yes, there was a problem: the regulator for the co2 tank was broken and they had to wait for another to be delivered. it was kind of a long wait. i felt bad for the first band because there was almost no one around and even fewer people listening and no one at all with a little fermented lubrication to incite a little dancing. but they were troopers and pretty enjoyable. they are called blivit. anyway, by the time they were totally done, there was beer. and it was good beer. so i had as much of this beer as i wanted and the time began to slide past a little quicker. before i knew it, dusk was settling and some of the people who said they were going to be there at four-ish showed up at maybe eight-ish. these weren't even people i really wanted to see there, but they were indeed people i knew, and they were indeed there. i got shuffled off to one of their houses, which was right around the corner. it was not a place i anticipated ever finding myself in life, knowing the homeowner. no matter. i had enough beer in me to not navigate social situations in the manner i am accustomed to, and thus wound up at this house for quite a while. a lot of people wound up showing up and it was kind of a party, although the beer was markedly inferior to what i had been enjoying. some of the peopel who showed up were pretty cool though and actually live by me in a different part of town. i was surprised i didn't already know them, really. so that was enjoyable, but i'm not sure why they were there at all. after more arrivals and ensuing shenanigans and confusion, i wasn't entirely sure what to do. i wound up back at the festival, which was still going but wrapping up. last band was pretty good too, but my own quality was in decline after a rather lengthy afternoon. i walked my sorry ass a few blocks to the el, got on, and went as far as they would take me, which was about where i needed to be. however, it was actually even closer to the grocery store, and i decided that this would be a good time to do a little shopping. honestly, it could have gone much worse. i think i will probably eat most of what i purchased. good thing i was already totally full when i went or i probably would have purchased a lot of things i was not going to eat ever or at least before they were no longer worth eating.
i am currently killing the last few minutes i have before my night class. mondays are kind of brutal, and not because of class, but more because of sheer time spent in this god forsaken building. just being in this space is taxing for me. it shouldn't be, but it is. also, if i hear one more person talk about tonights upcoming eagles game, i may have to punch them.
speaking of eagles, i had a rough night... no. i just read a funny case where don henley was the plaintiff. he successfully sued these folks in texas who made a pun-based ad for their henley shirts. i do not know if i was aware that he shared a name with a garment. but i like cases with things i know about, like don henley.
and finally, RIP richard wright. if i didn't have class i would be trying to sort out and play each contribution he made to the floyd cataglogue. maybe i'll just stay up late. in my hat.

kwame kilpatrick was forced to leave due to lack of respect

2008-09-09T19:05:00.000-07:00

ladies and gentlemen, the mayor of detroit. i know i'm a little late on this one, but hey, i've been busy. kind of. at any rate, it is more difficult to blog when not home and alone most of the week. the point is, it took kwame an even more unreasonable amount of time to remove himself from office. beyond that, i strongly desire to acquire a "free kwame" t-shirt. preliminary internet searches have proven fruitless. lots of stupid puns on "text" and so forth. but the streets of the d have to hold a trove of kwame-related merchandise. i would like to think so, anyway. so someone closer than me should probably go to shitty parts of detroit and get me some kwame swag. these will be collector's items, people. he was, after all, the first hip-hop mayor. just ask him.
i'm even later in reporting this: my favorite sentence of all time that i have read on wikipedia is no longer there. i mean, i guess they didn't have a citation, but i feel like someone in the know was just sharing the truth. through a series of events (you know how wikipedia goes) i wound up at the entry for the kottonmouth (this is not marked. something is wrong.) kings. background info: their first album prominently featured a rapper who left the group not long after the release of said album. he has not appeared with them since, and there has been no explaination for this course of events. someone who helps the world's knowledge through wikipedia knew though: saint dog was forced to leave due to lack of respect. i promise this is absolutely hilarious if you are familiar with the kottonmouth kings and wikipedia. it's still pretty funny anyway. forced to leave. there was no choice. lack of respect. who was not respecting whom? it is unclear. what was the nature of this lack of respect? also unclear. we just can't be certain. all we know is that saint dog was forced to leave due to lack of respect. if the world was a perfect place, "[noun] was forced to leave due to lack of respect" would be the next major internet meme. i feel like i could make it happen with the right picture, just spamming the hell out of 4chan until people agree that it is funny. i was actually directed to something worthwhile recently from 4chan: metallicats?
other than those important things, there has been some other stuff. i moved. it went alright, dude's everything got a little dinged up. it is over though. i like the new place and having people around again. jack is probably the happiest cat in town and straw is coming along fine as well. my shit is still in total disarray, but whatever. it really doesn't make all that much of a difference to me just yet, although there will be some improvements. but really, my bedroom was pretty much a mess the whole time i lived alone; i took more care of the areas i actually hung out in. there are plenty of places to hang out here, and they're not even all my responsibility. we added an additional room in a way a couple days after i moved in. we cleared out the basement, which had clearly not happened for some time. it was mostly just full of crap that should have been thrown away, and so that is what we did with most of it. but now we have like an additional living room down there, got a drum set, my buddy has his turntables and all his records, couple guitars, couch, tables, shit. i wish i could say i have a car and everything (fuck yeah!) but it will be a while before that happens. for now it is prefereable to have a sweet space to hang out in.
there have been plenty of misadventures and minor bitching points over the last couple weeks, but i'll spare you all but one. on saturday, i went to the red bull soapbox derby thing. figured it would be alright, maybe see some cool rides, maybe some carnage, at least a new part of town. well, that new part of town was manayunk. manayunk is fucking terrible and i will never go back there. but i'm getting ahead of myself. so saturday here was a monsoon, ass end of hurricane who fucking knows what, one of those seven that went through the other week. just pouring buckets. and we figured we'd go, maybe there would be less of a crowd. well, we got there, and it did not apper to lack a crowd. at first i thought the place was just kind of stupid, lots of stupid shops with stupid punny names and such. and there was no parking, but i wasn't sure if that was just normal, like most of the city. so we're trying to find parking for a long time, which is always kind of a drag. and then we were like fuck it, we'll pay, and we went to the lot. they wanted twenty bucks, so it was back to the search because this was not something we were about to sink money into. eventually we found a space a ways a way and took a rather long walk in the rain, arriving at the course near the start of the festivities. but the walk there made me wary: we suspended the 'teams' game due to an overabundance of douchebags. it was a good thing we suspended it early, because the roving bands of drunken jersey types couldn't have prepared me for the scene at the actual event. it was not a place where i felt like i fit in so well. there was almost no room to maneuver and everywhere one moved there was a constant press of drunken morons trying to shove their way against the flow of the crowd. just a load of crap. it took us about twenty minutes of mostly standing around and listening to the obnoxious morning-show style announcing before we decided to get the hell out of there. on the walk back to the car, one of the few middle-aged residents of the area called out to us to ask if the race was already over. not over, i replied. just stupid. now that i write it all down it doesn't really sound that bad, but i promise i was pretty unhappy about it at the time. i guess it wasn't that great of a story. oh well, i already typed it.
school has continued to progress as well of course. it is still mostly pretty stupid. i like evidence a lot more than i thought i would, and international law a lot less. probaly because i've been reading a ton of stupid fucking statutes for it. that shit just doesn't read, you know. globalization and the constitution is godawful. just absolute bollocks, people running their damn mouths. it gets worse every time. unfair competition is kind of intense, the prof talks a mile a minute. but i can pay attention the best in that class because everything communicated is worthwhile and substantive. it is quite engaging. jurisprudence is also kind of intense. i like it because i get to go back and read a bunch of philosophy stuff. the bad news is that we are spending the entire class on natural law. i feel kind of screwed, because that isn't really the way the class was described at all. not the end of the world, but still kind of lame. also, the prof is blind. and intense. he reminds me of an old-school football coach or a state trooper, all with his reflective aviators and serious demeanor. he also gets real close to people. he says he speaks softly and that is why, but i hear him just fine wherever. he has one of those delightful accents that tags r onto the end of somewords, especially "lawr". that one comes up kind of a lot. he also drops h from the front of words. we talk a lot about uman (okay, not marked, spell check is just broken i guess) beings in this class, what with the natural law focus.
normally, this would be the part where i start complaining about football season being up in my shit and how awesome tea leaf green is playing right now and how a worldwide poll about the desirable outcome of the american election is asinine, but i'm not going to do that. this is because i don't have a good place to sit and type and my shoulder is giving out and also i would like to go drink a beer downstairs with my roommates. i don't think you're missing much. what really matters is the propogation of the phrase "forced to leave due to lack of respect".

back to bollocks

2008-08-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

the first crack back at it was notably less than inspiring. i really did try to have the best attitude i could about things, i swear, but i guess it just wasn't enough. kicked things off with evidence, which might not have been the right foot, but then i didn't get to write the schedule. it has like a hundred people in it and an awful lot of them want to be trial lawyers. this fails to thrill me. however, today i got into the homework (i didn't have books before that first class) and that went alright. very concrete, and i appreciate that. part of my beef with the first year curriculum is that it is supposed to be the portal into the central focus of the school, which is training people to be lawyers. the problem is that the material, while relevant to people becoming lawyers, and in fact foundational to that endeavor, is hurried and unfocused. it is taught by people who have a vast grasp of the material and understand how much of a gloss they are giving it, and yet no one wants to blow the whistle and say wait, we aren't really teaching in a comprehensible manner. in a rush to be comprehensive, the true goal is sacrificed. all that is left is a bizarre and arcane competition to fulfill lofty expectations that have no actual bearing on an individual's competence. the idea is not to identify critical thinkers or those who grasp the material on a deep level, rather, the goal is to discover who among the masses is willing to waste the most time on such an ultimately immaterial exercise. sorry about that. my point is that the purported goal of teaching people practical skills and knowledge is not the foundation of the introductory curriculum, and that it should be if that is how they are going to talk about it.
anyway, the material for evidence is all produced by the national institute for trial advocacy, which is more or less run by my school, and it serves its purpose remarkably more deftly than anything i have previously encountered. unfortunately, the course is taught through the lens of the courtroom, and that does not thrill me. i guess i was hoping, ironically, for something a little more broad-based. i want to know what is and is not admissible evidence, not how to object about it later. in the end, though, i will concede it is fair for them to do it the way they do. just doesn't get me fired up is all.
after that it was on to globalization (marked. huh.) and the constitution. this is one of the ones i expected to be a little more my speed. good theoretical underpinning, maybe fewer people. no. it is another huge class full of braying jackasses who string together buzzwords and jargon in an inane attempt to impress others rather than make a meaningful contribution to the discussion. this is the kind of course that i would probably have loved if it were taught as an undergrad poli sci class. but no. it is going to be a crock of bullshit where i listen to people i think very little of express opinions i care even less about. the only good news is that it doesn't have a book.
no book is great news because even though only three of my five courses have books, i have already dropped ab out $450 on books. and i am still missing the hardcover for one class, which should tag on i think about another $120. faaaack. the real kicker is that previous experience has demonstrated how pitifully little i shall even make use of some of these texts. my only hope is to recoup some money later on and blow it senselessly, ideally on high-quality beer.
this year i have my first evening class, and it holds much more promise than the rest of the schedule for a few reasons. first of all, it is the first reasonably sized class i have had here. that right there is enough to make me relatively thrilled about the prospects. secondly, it is the only class in the area of law i am hoping at this point to pursue, namely intellectual property. this class focuses on unfair competition and trademarks. this class is also the first i have had that is taught by an adjunct. normally this sort of thing would set me off, but this guy seems promising. spends most of his time practicing, has a nice long personal story of how he wound up where he is, and it is pleasingly organic compared to much of my tenured faculty. real job, real dissatisfaction, real solutions. none of this ducks-in-a-row clerked for supreme court bullshit. hopefully my optimism is rewarded.
today brought the first installment of international law, my initial fancy and contributing factor to the specifics of my current situation. i am reserving judgment on it thus far. it is, however, chock-full of all my least favorite people from last year. the prof i think is newer at my school, i think she taught somewhere else before. she called someone out on normative language though, and that is kind of cool. the text holds early promise, but i said the same thing about my torts book last year, and that turned out to be the biggest disaster i have ever encountered in professional printing. i could have shit out something better knowing nothing about the material. there is not a doubt in my mind about this. this was the class where they gave us a free updated edition (unheard of) and i turned it down. i didn't want to be personally responsible for book burning.
the one class i haven't had yet is jurisprudence. it is another one i feel could go either way at this juncture. the reading was fine by me, so we'll see how the class goes. the text was made up of selections from socrates, aristotle, and aquainas. nothing i hadn't seen, and kind of tough to approach without thinking about way too many things i had considered about these folks over the years. that is all fine and good, but we all had those couple of people in our first college philosophy class that just couldn't just the fuck and said nothing anyone else wanted to hear. i'm not worried about that happening, really. i made it through that before. no, my real concern is that as far as i can tell, a frightening percentage of "those people" decided to go to law school. this does not really seem implausible to me even abstractly. and in my experience, well... i've met plenty around here. we'll see what happens. i'm hoping for the best since the class is like two hours long.
so that takes care of school. let's have some good news. i was cleaning the other day and found these khakis, the only ones i moved out here with me. they were the only ones i had ever felt even somewhat comfortable in, probably mostly due to the cargo pockets. anyway, i hadn't worn them in a long time. i immediately recalled that this was due to their having an enormous hole in the crotch. but i still moved them here for some reason. anyway, it was the kind of tear that only rips when repaired, and so i was gonna pitch them. searched the pockets though, and found some scores. two dollars, first and foremost. all crumpled up with some other shit. other shit included an absurd amount of camel cash, a mulligan's receipt, and a gruv unit set list (from teazers!?). i was happy to find all of it, but it proved that i had not worn these pants in like just about three and a half years. and yet i moved them out here with me.
brief story about the hole in those pants: i was trying to catch one of the cats one time when he was out around auburn. i believe i went over a fence.
in more good news, i had the extremely good fortune to be the recipient of a couple old school camel wides filters the other night. i cant believe how much better they are than the new ones. they hit the spot so unbelievably well. i tried to write a complaint letter to those fuckers but i wouldn't cough up enough information, so they claimed they couldn't verify my identity. i don't want your fucking coupons, i shouldn't have to prove i'm eighteen to say you fucked up your product. just fix it already. i'm pretty resigned to the fact that such a thing is not likely to occur.
my current recourse to old school is lilly, rosemary, and the jack of hearts.
i haven't made it to any shows since dr. dog, but a few good ones are coming up and i hope to have money to see at least one and hopefully two and ideally all three, but it would be a stretch. philly slick is playing at world cafe on sunday, old crow medicine show is coming to town at a lousy venue, and the avett brothers are playing with drive-by truckers in baltimore, both sometime in later september. wish me luck.
one good thing about being back at school is hitting up a couple old lunch favorites. definitely got a cheesesteak one day and the notorious chicken b.l.t. the other. just what i was looking for. the food is alright, but sometimes just getting what one wants is as good as something high quality that just isn't fitting the mood. nice to have something work out at school, sitting around and talking shit, watching first years not believe their ears. whatever, the most important lesson for law school and many other things is to be able to have some real good laughs at it.

epic sandwich

2008-08-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

oh man. it was so good. hell, it is still good. i live quite near to a well-regarded deli. they have won some awards and stuff which is meaningful in a place this big with so many delis. but this is the real deal. i had never been, mostly due to my aversion to paying ten dollars for a sandwich. forget that, i decided. today will be the day i taste and judge for myself. as it turns out, the quality of the ingredients alone pretty much justifies the price. however, if that wasn't enough, the sandwiches they make are roughly the size of a more or less average human head. and dear god, are they ever delicious.
i had the restaurant school special, which is a double-decker sandwich on rye featuring corned beef, smoked honey turkey breast, brisket of beef, cole slaw, and russian dressing. i don't think much of cole slaw, really, in it's usual habitat of a small plastic cup. never really bother to eat it. it was damn good on this though, even though it was a primary contributor to the hellacious mess eating something along these lines makes. i even ate the pickle spear, and i never eat pickles. for some reason i thought it was tasty. i just think i was so happy about the sandwich that everything started to become delectable by association. even the ginger ale seemed better than normal. all this, and i only ate half of the thing, and i am the perfect full. not overly stuffed or uncomfortable. just in the sweet spot. it is going to be tough not to take a nap.
my main regret is that it took me so long to check the place out. i mean, it is really close. and i knew it would be a cool place, check out some pics here. it was, like i said, the cost barrier. but it was all illusory. i would not think much about paying six to seven dollars for something i thought would be a decent sandwich at say, jimmy john's. but i would more than likely eat all of it at once. and it wouldn't be half as good and i wouldn't have much to say about it. but this sandwich is not a basic PFU (personal food unit for those not in the know); it is easily two meals. in any event, this place has been there forever so i'm glad everyone wasn't as slow as me on the uptake that at ten dollar a sandwich, this is actually quite a good deal.
in other news, there is a new wilco album coming out in the spring. i look forward to that, although probably no one else cares anymore. i had noticed one or two new songs popping up in set lists and got interested. although now that i think about it, they will be more or less due to put out a new one by the time spring rolls around. time flies whether you are having fun or not, you know. also, they are playing here, but as an opening act. on the one hand this is surprising but on the other hand it is mostly just cool because they are opening for neil fucking young. i will probably not be able to afford that ticket or find anyone else who wants to afford a ticket and go along. it is in early or mid december anyway, and that will probably be exam time anyway. on the other hand, tea leaf green the night before an exam went alright last time. oh well. if anyone cares, that bill will also appear in chicago and detroit. jeff has an upcoming solo run in spain. what a dick.
i have gotten a little ways into riddley walker. this is not a book that can be read at a fast pace. this is of course due to the fascinating things hoban does with language. it is strange to read a novel at the same pace as semi-brutal non-fiction (i.e. husserl, any law commentator, etc.) but, i feel, even more rewarding. it allows for the interpretive creative space of well-contextualized artistic vision while demanding a careful and close reading. additionally, my current take on the book is that it constitutes a strenuous examination of transcendence as a natural historical human phenomenon. this gets me all kinds of excited. i might even break out the heidegger, but more likely that i will just think about it. i'll think about it when i take a break from thinking about how i clearly fucked up by going to law school and not doing something i enjoy instead. oh well, at least that sandwich was pretty good.

week? weak

2008-08-18T19:45:00.000-07:00

until recently, i was blissfully unaware of the noose draped around my neck. i turned a blind eye to all the indications in the neighborhood: piles of ikea packaging on curbs, longer lines at the cvs, lots of people walking around with name tags. hell, i was considering metaphorically getting out of dodge entirely, to some other metaphorical place that had no metaphorical extradition treaty with the proverbial dodge. but then i decided i would do what i had to do, pay the price, and accept my sentence. no sooner did that happen then i discovered the noose was not only around my neck, but tightening. quickly.
classes begin in a week. i just found out what mine are today. but i can't do anything about them until wednesday. i am not sure if i am going to do anything or what it will be. i'm still kind of adjusting to the fact that i have accepted returning to something i have so much distaste for. it was a narrow thing, i could just as easily have said screw it i guess. i just have a tough time saying that for certain things. like this. things where everyone i know is going to have to know about it. and i didn't really know what else to do i guess. that was probably a contributing factor. i wish i could joke about not wanting to work. honestly, though, i would rather just have a somewhat decent job. even a lousy one doesn't sound that bad. go, do your thing, make a little money, go home, forget about it. plenty of people lead fine existences without graduate degrees, or degrees of any kind really. but for some reason i decided i needed another one, and even though i'm not so sure about that now, i already started, and to me that means i should probably finish. and like i said, i wasn't really sure what else to do. would have been awkward for a while.
so it will be back at it before i know it. i haven't really done much this summer, it seems. then again, it never seems to me that i do all that much in any context. oh well. it has gotten me this far. i did a few things i guess, i could always go back and check old posts. that would probably simply reveal that the things i feel are of note appear to be so only to me. tough to do the truly notable on a thin budget. sometimes that doesn't matter though, like the free show in town the other night. went to go see dr. dog. those guys are great, check 'em out, they have some stuff on archive. psychedelic indie pop type stuff. think tripping daisy/polyphonic spree (lead vocals sound like tim, and the second half of the show featured string and horn sections), flaming lips, my morning jacket circa a few years ago. a fun show, even solo, and a pleasant walk home from rittenhouse.
i actually found out about the show from this neighborhood quasi-bum type guy named omar. i see him pretty frequently and he is unfailingly enthusiastic about almost everything and he usually wants a cigarette, except when he has some he insists i take one. as the band took the stage, i saw this very same dude run up and introduce the band from the central mic. i saw him after the show and thanked him for telling me about it. he looked shocked (and drunk) and exclaimed "it's over!?". this was a couple blocks west of where they even played.
all that aside, after he introduced the band, one of them commented that those were wise words from a wise man. partly tongue in cheek, but partly factual. omar does say the damndest things. pretty observant guy, or at least more so than one would expect. under unfortunate circumstances, i feel like i could be that guy, which is part of the reason i elected to continue in a debt-accruing hell hole. he is completely off-base at all times, but never fails to say something that could be classified as thoughtful, along with a generous helping of absolute bullshit. he has a stopwatch now that he wears about his neck. he says it is to time people on their bullshit, because he can only spend so much time listening to peoples' bullshit, you know? the irony is not lost upon anyone.
in better news, i have enjoyed a nice new beer or two recently. if you get lagunitas, make sure to watch out for sirius, a supposed "hi-gravity" cream ale. very unique character in the beer; familiar flavors delivered in an unconventional manner. medium-bodied, highly viscous, sweet almost but not quite cloying, not entirely unlike common cream soda in fact. but then boom, a fairly legitimate hop kicker comes in and clears out everything else. overall a thoroughly worthwhile beverage experience, try not to miss out as it is a supposed special release.
also had the good fortune to come across rogue's double ipa on tap. wow. maybe there just isn't a hop shortage in oregon. a very very rich iteration of the style, very gratifying. my sister says it smells like armpit. i beg to disagree. find out for yourself and report back.
i have had some pretty good luck these last couple days. or at least what counts as good for me. this included my biggest score ever from a free book pile. typically when i look at a pile of free books, i think hmm, that might be interesting. worth having around. and then i rarely if ever read them. at least no one is throwing them away. there is a whole bookshelf full of my stuff back home, and a lot of it is just books that school wouldn't buy back or books i acquired from free book piles. suffice to say that i have not found anything life-changing in free book piles just yet. yesterday, i found a book i had actually looked for in stores before. like one i was totally willing to buy. one i would certainly read. russel hoban's riddley walker. i have only just started it, but i am probably going to read a lot more later today. if you're not familiar with the book, it is a post-apocalyptic novel written entirely in a posited pidgin form of english, lots of phonetic spelling and such. i may have some questions about spelling conventions in old and middle english.
the other score just happened. i'm at the coffee shop. before i went in i was finishing a smoke and a dozen of the multitude of new penn students around went in before me. i was kind of worried. for some reason, they all left without ordering. this was good enough for me. but then i tried to buy a soda. dude behind the counter, though, is like IRON MAIDEN! YEAH! (i have my maiden shirt on) and he doesn't let me pay for it. it's like a secret club, he says. i guess i can support that. i left the money for the soda in the tip jar, so everyone wins. everyone who is physically present anyway. i'm sure whoever owns the place is doing just fine and is probably not going to miss a single soda. plus not enough people tip at this place in my experience. barista wages are not known for being exorbitant, either.
the internet of course also continues to yield some treasures. those with a taste for some seriously dark humor would be well advised to check out a softer world. kind of a cool concept too; the visual aspect of the comic is one or more photos split up into panels with superimposed text. one person takes the pics, the other writes the words. it appears to work pretty well. the humor reminds me of some dinosaur comics strip, which is not too surprising as the guy who writes the text is friends with the dinosaur comics guy.
given my background being brought up in what i would consider more or less a fairly conservative christian setting, i am surprised i have never heard of jack chick, or his tracts. but now i know. thanks achewood. if you already know of them, well, then you know that they are ridiculous. absolutely ludicrous, really. an embarrassment to respectable christianity in my humble opinion. if you like to laugh your ass off while shaking your head, i would recommend angels?, dark dungeons, and bad bob! for starters. from then on check out stuff on muslims and catholics, and anything "adapted for [insert demographic]". this guy really really doesn't like catholics. i am glad i was not raised to believe that catholics aren't christians. i didn't actually hear anyone make that claim until quite late in life, and it rather shocked me. apparently it is more widespread than i thought. although i guess there is a lot of history of protestants having some pretty not-nice things to say regarding catholics. at any rate, these tracts are completely outrageous. if you were familiar before now, let me know how you were and why i wasn't.

some things don't change

2008-08-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

i couldn't get any internet happening at home, which is somewhat disturbing, but not quite the end of the world. i went to the coffee shop i go to when i need internet, and that is still where i am. and i still hate coffee shops. this one has its own individual issues, mostly acquired from location. some things are just how coffee shops are, like seven dollar sandwiches that aren't even made here. and also terribly stupid, loud, and annoying people. i am very sad that my headphones are broken. the music is godawful. this ridiculous chick next to me alternates between chatting on her cell and getting seriously down with her jams. apparently she is the person this coffee shop is meant for, she is certainly a penn poster child. the other people next to me are the most halfass grad students i've ever overheard at a coffee shop. they do not seem to actually know what the fuck they are doing or supposed to be doing. instead they have shifted to a lengthy conversation about somebody's boyfriend. repeating the mantra that relationships are about compromise, the girl detailed several things that this guy had better fucking do or else. it did not sound like a whole lot of negotiation was going to happen. oh man, now one of my prize-winning co-habitants just tried to get the barista to make a sandwich while she (the prize-winner) was standing next to a cooler display full of sandwiches.
also i began reading the hitchhiker's guide books again. they are still extremely entertaining, hilarious, and difficult to put down. the plot has not changed either, which is unfortunate from a predictability standpoint, but there was no need to mess with success.
this is my update: i still don't like coffee shops because i have never liked them, and the hitchhiker's guide series has not degraded in quality in any way, being a static work of fiction. also, there are several people in the world that i do not like, many for entirely superficial reasons. you are now up to speed.

it was totally people

2008-08-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

if you missed the opening ceremonies last night, you might consider using your internet powers to find a video of it somewhere. it was actually something worthwhile on television, in strange ways. literally thousands of people involved as performers, and they pulled off some strange and entertaining stuff. a lot of planning clearly went into the whole thing. the commentary was a total highlight; the people they had announcing were pretty ridiculous. bob fucking costas. during most of the artistic portion (like two hours, it is pretty extreme and kind of intimidating), they were clearly reading off of teleprompters and saying some pretty things unnatural for them. but the parade of nations came along and those dudes said some outrageous shit.
but seriously, the performance piece was amazing. ludicrously epic. we decided that like twenty years down the road dvds of this performance will enjoy great popularity among certain segments of the college population. "what are you doin' tonight man?" "dude, i know someone who has a copy of beijing '08, we're totally watchin that shit!"
after all, it featured thousands of people in jumpsuits that had a bunch of lights on them. the whole thing was pretty entertaining though. i had no idea i was about to be into the olympics. i'm not like planning on blocking out time to catch as much i can, but everything has the potential to be alright. caught the women's beach volleyball at eulogy earlier, usa v. the netherlands. the dutch were bottom ranked in the group, americans top, usa wins 2-0. they made it close though, and got a point in the group for some reason. maybe because the second set had to go extra match points.
also had an excellent pint at eulogy, great divide hercules ipa off the tap. wholly satisfactory double ipa, but nothing to set it apart other than being a perfect typical example. i am only hard on the style because i love it so much. so many good ones out there.
i happened into eulogy on my way back from some sort of practice protest i watched. i had seen these people before in the dead of winter, so this was much better. however, the destination was not anywhere as close to an el stop. i decided to walk because i hadn't seen a lot of queen village. worth walking through, very nice neighborhood, pretty, lots of residential but not overly dominant. seems to be kind of yuppie, has a lot of townhomes with garages on the bottom floor, everything looks pretty new for how old the area is, lots of construction going on, lots of babies and dogs. telltale signs of yuppitude. lots of nice-but-not-too-nice (aka moderately affordable) restaurants, probably a great place to live. inordinate amount of dead stickers in the windows of houses and on vehicles. strange.
the event itself was pretty low key, but it was also well staked out by city people whose job it is to manage these things. good folks, by and large. lots of picture taking by all sorts of people. so many people have cameras now, and that has good and bad sides, but it is certainly a big deal these days. one guy had some sort of apparatus akin to something used for rock climbing and used it to hang off of a tall poll next to shorter ones he could stand on. pretty tenacious. especially compared with the other sort-of media types present: two of them without real clear credentials chose to interview a notably attractive young lady from the group rather than one of the two leaders. just found that kind of funny. you know how those documentary-types are, right john edwards?
not a whole lot happened, and it was hot out, so it was fortunate that eulogy was on the way back to the el. it was also fortunate that i didn't stay there long and made it back in time for the flea market. had to make some tough decisions as usual, but i'm also pleased with what i chose. reasonable prices on things that are great to have on vinyl. all in pretty good shape, and all around five bucks each. some girls, after the gold rush, a night at the opera, band of gypsies, and highway 61 revisited. the idea was to buy things that i will listen to often. it was nice to have a couple bucks after getting paid. reminds me of why a job is better than law school. i don't even want to think about that garbage.

ac unit

2008-08-06T20:01:00.001-07:00

no, i still don't have one of those. no point, really. here, though, ac is shorthand not only for a system for cooling an area, but also a system for emptying wallets/bank accounts: atlantic city. this was my first time in jersey at all, and by extension atlantic city. the drive to ac was pretty picturesque, really; at least nicer than i had imagined. this part of jersey is not completely built up, well, not with buildings anyway. the drive to atlantic city kinda builds the place up. hell, the road is named the atlantic city expressway. this is a road dedicated to people going from philly to ac, and vice versa. and it has billboards the whole way. and most of them are from casinos. and most of those are for a casino that hasn't even been fucking built yet. some of those are pretty shameless. my favorite one was "you know what this town needs? another casino."
if i were asked to sum up atlantic city with one word, that word would unsurprisingly be "weird". when you're coming into town on the highway, the first thing you see is a giant, skinny, lengthy parking lot between directions of the highway. i guess people park there and shuttle into town? given traffic on the way out, that would make excellent sense. but back to getting in, not out. after literally like at least a half mile of parking, the highway kind of turns and becomes a somewhat main street of the city. it dumps you in right by one of the biggest casinos on one side, and then on the other side it is an oxymoronic mega-mini-mall of outlet shops. everything is tacky looking, but not in a classic campy kind of way. more like this shit was all built around ten years ago kind of tacky. one of my first questions was whether anyone lived in this place at all, since it was literally retail/entertainment as far as the eye could see, which wasn't all that far.
but i got my answer after several blocks of crawling traffic: everything drops off and suddenly everything looks older than fifty years without repair, save new neon lights in takeout place windows. that part of town reminded me of medium-shady areas in west and north philly. our directions put us on the road that separated the part of town that makes money from the part of town that has no money. we made a brief detour into no-money land to get gas. in jersey, you are not allowed to pump your own gas. this seems a little asinine to me, but apparently the result is that some otherwise perfectly competent people from jersey actually do not know how to pump gas. they assume it is tricky business. i guess if there was some service someone "professional" always did for me, i would probably just figure it was better off in their hands.
anyway, we got back to where we needed to be, and parked right next to the valet parking lot for like two-fifty in meter fare for a savings of like twelve bucks. we had a bit of a walk down what i believe was actually oriental avenue. got a look at most of the monopoly streets, and several of them are in a part of town that does not bear mention anywhere really, and probably not board games. but at the end of the street was THE boardwalk. i did not find park place. the boardwalk was also weird, lots of people but not a ton going on. lots of entrances for things that had other doors away from the shore. those buildings are massive. the boardwalk has lost a lot of its carnivalesque appeal, but there is still a small semi-permanent setup of amusement rides and food vendors, and that was kind of cool. no high-diving horses, though.
so the show was at the house of blues. franchised venues kind of turn me off in the first place, but this was one of the most ridiculous things i have ever encountered. so i knew that this was, full title, the house of blues atlantic city at showboat. showboat, i was aware, was a casino. it is a massive structure to behold. supposed to be a mardi-gras thing brought to you by harrah's, but it sure didn't look real festive, more like a hospital from the outside. but once you get in... well, getting in was tricky. i expected a little bit of shenanigans due to my previous house of blues experience in cleveland, where, despite abundant signage, i was assured that i had entered a restaurant, and not a venue. but there was only one entrance far as i could see, so that was the door it was going to have to be.
so in the door we went. restaurant to the front of me, restaurant (same one?) to the right of me, and something billed as a nightclub to the left. the nightclub, or whatever it was, did not appear to be the venue at all. they had signs. some sort of male strippers or something. some real classy broads waiting to get in on that, as you might imagine, given all the variables. so up towards the restaurants is the box office, and we ask, and get directed to go upstairs. so we go up between the restaurant/s and boom, it is totally a casino. so i am trying to find a venue, and already i have been beset with restaurant/s, a gift shop, a "nightclub", and a casino, and now i have to go upstairs. we go upstairs. i know what clutch fans look like, and i wasn't seeing all that many. no, at the top of the stairs there is a much different restaurant type thing, meant to be all classy, with some fancy name. most of the people in and around this place are elderly and well-dressed. probably not the clutch show. so we keep going, walking past all sorts of people. i stop at the bathroom and some guy comes in along with me and starts spouting lebowski quotes. this man is drunk. he has a baseball hat and a beard. he is most certainly going to clutch. we haven't bollocksed it up entirely; we have to be there.
and there we were. after a brief line and some overly-aggressive security (i thought you waved the wand past me, not hit me with it), we were in. the so-called house of blues atlantic city looked remarkably like the cleveland one, no big surprise. but it was a lot bigger. one of the opening bands was already going. they were called lionize, and i quite enjoyed them. they were four dudes who clearly listen to shitloads of reggae, dub, and clutch. i loved their keyboards. it looked like the bass player was playing through a leslie, which would be strange. sounded great loud as hell. i was under the impression that there would be four bands, but there were only three, and these guys were probably like halfway finished when i got in. they made a plea to the crowd to buy merch so that they could buy pot. they were extremely explicit about this. unfortunately i did not have money for merch, or i probably would have bought an ep in any event. or maybe this badass clutch shirt made specially for this show, but i decided that even if i had the money, i probably don't need three black clutch shirts.
the next band was murphy's law, and they were kind of silly, but a lot of fun. i got the impression that they didn't really care what the crowd thought of them personally or as a band or musically. no, their priority was that those in attendance were having an absolute fucking blast. they were sort of a punk/speed metal outfit, somewhat simplistic fun stuff. their twist was that they had a money sax player who did some cool stuff. they were four predictable dudes for a band like that, and then the sax player was a black guy who was probably like 15 years older than anyone else in the band. it certainly worked. before they started, we noticed that there was a case of budweiser on the stage. we joked about it staying out there the whole time. it did. upon further inspection, there was also a fifth of jager next to said case. at first i thought these guys were going to be an instrumental band, they played a good tune, and then this big dude walked onstage with a mic and started hollering at the crowd. clearly the frontman. the band starts playing and the dude starts singing and almost immediately he leaves the stage. but not by the side, no, he goes off the front to the crowd level and takes the fifth of jager with him. he's pullin on it between lines, and starts passing it around the crowd. shameless way to endear yourself, but he really seemed to just want to be partying and have the crowd party with him, and there is something to be said for that. the set was high energy, and the dude stayed down by the crowd and they killed the shit out of that jager, and he started pounding and handing out bottles of bud. when the jager was running low he made a comment about how "this one is almost cowbelled". i thought that was a pretty cool turn of the phrase and made a note of it. however, later on, it proved to be no slang. during a drum break the lead singer walked over to the drummer and held it up and the dude just whaled on it as part of a solo. i couldn't believe the thing didn't break. it actually sounded really good. at any rate, this band had a good fuckin time, and that is just excellent if you ask me. they embraced their role as an opening band and referenced the upcoming clutch set more than a few times, culminating in a joke tune entitled "you are not ready to see the band clutch". there was actually another great humor song about happy the bouncer, sang to one of the front row bouncers. it pretty much went "happy... the bouncer!... dun dun dun... happy... the bouncer!" etc. good times.
clutch of course killed it. i hadn't seen them in a while, although this was probably time number fifteen or something. no surprises in the setlist, and they appear to no longer have the organ player, which makes me a sad metal in some ways, but the show was really well played and had some solid jams, including a legitimate (i.e. non-jager) cowbell jam. the guitar tech played with them on a couple tunes as usual, but after he was done he also proposed to his girl, who accepted. that was kind of cool; he's a good guy, been with 'em forever, has his own pretty decent band. it was also their manager's birthday, which got brought up several times by all the bands, kind of a running gag. all in all, it gave the whole evening a properly celebratory feel. too bad i can't afford to get hammered off eight dollar beers that take half an hour each in line to acquire. that place could probably have doubled their booze sales with a better setup, and tripled them if they dropped 1/4 of the price. their loss. oh well, i had a fuckin blast.
the next night was sunday, and that means quizzo. we actually took second for the first time in a while to win twenty bucks to the bar; lost by one measly point. oh well. we played as "honey, i shrunk the manginas". i don't know if i've mentioned it, but we are usually "manginas in the mist". we switch it up now and then, but it is almost always some movie with a key word replaced by mangina. once, we were manginas II, secret of the ooze. that might be my favorite. it is a fun thing to do with movies, almost as good as this.
the next couple of days (and even today) saw me work on a special quick-turnaround project for my prof. i found it interesting and learned a lot. i worked pretty hard on it, too. unfortunately, i couldn't really answer what he wanted in the way he wanted it. the argument he wanted to make just didn't match the jurisprudence. i felt like a real jackass emailing him this morning and being like, yeah, i don't have what you need, but i tried hard. not a lot i could or can do about it i guess, but i don't imagine he is real thrilled with me, and that is kind of weak. it just sucks to try hard and more or less fail. we've all been there.
but for some good news... i hopefully get paid tomorrow. that is not the good news i wish to impart. the point of getting paid tomorrow is that i haven't had a whole lot of cash, what with the rent-paying and all that. i had been at school working on that thing, and checked my balance on the way home. $3.44. ouch. but i had a few bucks on me, and given that i had actually been working hard at something, i reckoned i could do with some beer. well, that and the day ended with a y. at any rate, i wanted some beer, for real. the deal with beer across the street is that pbr forties are three seventy-five each or two for five. i had like four forty. i checked all my pockets, in all pants. even pants i know i haven't worn since i've moved. nothing. nothing at all. i don't have a couch so i couldn't scope the cushions. i have one chair that can hide change, and yeah, it wasn't hiding any from me. but there was a dime on the floor next to the chair. step in the right direction. now all i needed was a clean-cut fitty cent.
people ask me for change all the time. sometimes i give it to them. i reckoned maybe it was time i asked some people for some change. went down in front of the beer store, smoking a hand roll as always. sat at one of the two tables. other table had a couple dudes drinking some forties. i knew they had my money. talked to them for a minute, suggested that i bum them a smoke. went in for the change spiel. i don't really have a ton of practice or anything. first dude, who seemed friendlier, was all, no i don't have any cash of any sort. other dude was all, no change. fortunately, though, he had a dollar. i traded him fifty cents for the bill, and was in business. went in, got my beer, went back out and drank most of one and shot the shit. the dudes were alright man.
i've actually been talking to strangers more than normal i guess. the night before that it was the dreaded mill creek special. they upped the damn price to twelve dollars. the bartender assured me, however, that it was going into their pockets. thus, i don't feel bad and will probably just deduct it from the tip. hey man, i am on a budget here. in any event, i met some old guy. richard? he was downing tonic waters. that was all. he brought candy of his own. a well-traveled old man with a money beard. nice guy to talk to and watch the baseball. and then there was this israeli guy, benny. he graduated from moody bible institute, which stunned and thrilled me in that state. he was an interesting person to talk to. we chilled for a while. it was a good, strange time.
today didn't involve so many strangers, well, at least none that i really wanted talk to. i lucked out and got a call from my buddy at school: extra ticket to the phillies game. i was pretty psyched. just had to find a way to get there and back (thanks ben). the park is beautiful, and the game was fun. not the most exciting game ever, but a decisive 5-0 victory. the only bummer was that the reason we had these tickets was that it was like a temple prof/research assistant night, so we were sitting with a lot of people i didn't like. the broad in front of me ate CARROT STICKS at a fucking baseball game. she was also waving around some hillary clinton book talking about how she would have been "the best president we ever had". i hate those people so much. i probably shouldn't, but man. fuck those people. i hate to have to say it over some minor differences in worldview and personal aesthetics, but i really just can't stand them and their ralph loren and gelled hair and khakis and agsadgsdgagdsag. hate them. but i had a good time. and it was free. those two go together well. i'm hoping for more of that in the upcoming days.

OOPArts

2008-07-31T17:57:00.000-07:00

today was a day for a journey into the wikipedia. i would like it if the xkcd dude would make a map of just the wikipedia like the online communities one ("here be anthropomorphic dragons" kills me every time) or the internet one (or at least start making funny comics again, like at least once a week). i don't know how big of a chunk i would have covered today, obviously it couldn't be that big; i did it all today. but it is certainly a prime chunk of territory of wikipedia land. this is because it could fit into the syntax of [somewhat pejorative prefix] + [academic discipline]. i learned from my cryptozoology shenanigans last semester that the wikipedia is prime for these sorts of things.
the order of the day could be described as pseudoarchaeology. specifically, out-of-place artifacts, or OOPArts, as those in the know apparently call them. this was actually inspired by today's dinosaur comics edition, which mentioned the coso artifact. it was all downhill from there. i am now up to speed on all what was fit to wiki. the strange thing it that the ones that seem like the most bullshit have the most information. odd. but i have several friends that are all about these sorts of things. i don't really care how silly they are or aren't, i am mostly just glad that such tings exist. i do believe that every side has some sort of vested interest going, but it is pretty tricky to try and come to an independent somewhat objective opinion. clearly, most people these days try and follow contemporary scientific standards, and there is some merit in that. but on the other hand, think about how those people were probably written off as loonies at one time. pendulums always swing, and not necessarily in predictable ways. if the early going science types could be super right about some things, i don't see why contemporary mystics can't be super right about others. tomorrow: ancient astronaut theories.
if i were a musician, i would have a gold mine for names of everything via these inquiries. out of place artifact and ancient astronaut theory and pseudoarchaeology are just the beginning. saqqara bird and kingoodie hammer are sure hits. have you heard the antikythera mechanism e.p.? it is almost as good as the old stuff on baghdad battery.
actually, the antikythera mechanism is where it all came together in one of those sort of predictable but sort of bizarre internet synchronicities earlier. as you may have surmised, this was kind of an internet-heavy day. at any rate, i was keeping an eye on my feeds including the pre-loaded bbc news one. halfway down the list was something about a 2100 year old computer and the olympics. sure enough, that ancienct computer was none other than the antikythera mechanism, and it turns out some of its gears helped to keep tracks of the olympic games. go figure.
but back to music for a moment. i was compelled to put on sgt. pepper's earlier with a keen desire to hear the tale of lovely rita, meter maid. good news, folks: it remains as fine a tune as ever. i did notice some things however. i find it very odd that the album flip comes between for the benefit of mr. kite and within you without you. these are both super awkward side endings and beginnings. however, they do fit squarely into the middle of the record. i don't know what to do. send me your amended track listings, and i will call paul and we will talk. maybe we can work this out or something. also, someone asked me about beatles' little help from my friends vs. joe cocker's. for most things, joe cocker can kind of kiss my ass. he is the qdoba of soulful music: promising more than he delivers, workin' off other people's shit. but he does do a damn fine version of that cut. however, i think paul's bass actually comes through for the win on that one. it is remarkable and plays a rather forward role here. very emotive. so it turns out joe cocker can pretty much stick it.
i am now listening to steely dan. i only mention that to annoy dekkinga. also, steely dan is excellent.
this is why i can't post so much these days: no law school to complain about and very little else going on to mention. i haven't even made it to atlantic city yet. other updates include that i burned my stomach the other night trying to fry bacon at a point where it was not advisable to do so. the burn is parallel to the scar i have from the time i more or less impaled myself on that post on the dune. at least this is an injury with a definite and plausible explanation, for what it's worth.
a couple weeks ago i received a letter from my landlord. he informed me that he was going to raise the rent. i was not surprised, as my downstairs neighbor had told me that this happens like every year. i was also not bothered, as i planned on moving anyway. but it is the time of the month for paying rent, and so i dropped it off with a note stating that i intended to move out. the landlord called back in a couple of hours. i have trouble understanding him, especially on the phone, so it was a little odd, but communication more or less occurred. first, he wanted to make sure i was serious. i was. then he asked me about the price increase, which was only ten dollars a month. i told him i understood why he would have to, but he sort of wanted to negotiate. i informed him that it wasn't really a big deal, but i was going to go and he could probably find someone else. he then offered to not raise the rent at all if i would stay. this wasn't really going to sway me, but it was kind of a strange offer. it is nice to be wanted. i feel like a good tenant. mostly, i think he would just like to hold onto tenants who don't really ask him for much and he doesn't really have to concern himself with, just keep cashing the checks. oh well.
that is all folks. well, pretty much. maybe a little altered steely dan lyrics? no? oh yeah, anyone who thinks that shit is funny has heard it already. well then...

cooked food eaters anonymous

2008-07-29T18:18:00.000-07:00

i was trying to hold out until somebody solved the foot mystery, but it just doesn't seem like that is gonna happen. i'm not gonna lie; i'm a little disappointed in y'all. a little summer sleuthing, maybe an opportunity to visit british columbia. i would have done it myself, but, you know, duty calls. or at least not doing a whole lot calls.
i went to go see that phish band again last friday. i can't remember if i have mentioned them before. they are called simple and they play at my bar sometimes. they do a pretty darn good job, really. much better than, say, the band that plays a couple phish songs every show but is not exclusively a phish band, i.e. cover tops or super happy fun time american jam band or whatever they are or mr. blotto. in any event, it is a great occasion to go and have some drinks and a good time. they did not disappoint.
we haggled the cover charge, which is something i had not done previously, but it was kind of funny. the same door guy is always there, but i don't know if he recognizes me or not. it was supposed to be seven bucks each (the door guy also said there were three bands; thankfully it was just the one), and i was going in with two other people. so i'm kind of giving him a hard time, all like c'mon man. cut us a break, let us in three for fifteen. and he just laughs long and deep, and he is naturally large, being a door-man, and so it is quite a bellow. he comes off as pretty incredulous about my offer. he's all nah, nah, man, we can't do that. he says it has to be sixteen for the three of us.
me sister, as some of you may know, is going to live in london for like nine months or something coming up pretty soon. she recently confirmed her housing plans, which will be in a university dorm. she will have no kitchen, but rather catered british dorm food. this prospect should appeal to no one, and rightly so she has considered alternatives, including raw food. so we were walking around and went into a bookstore to check out some raw food cookbooks. all i have to say is fuck those people. one book was alright, gave the green light to for real cheese and prosciutto and stuff. apparently the cutoff is 115 degrees fahrenheit. most of the books were pretty lame, mostly just half directions on how to make substitutes for things people actually eat and then recipes utilizing those substitutes.
one book really pissed me off, by some fuckhead vegan new york assholes with a bullshit restaurant. that one was subtitled "how to get the glow". apparently these people think that those on a raw food diet acquire some sort of glow after a month or so. the whole thing was super sexualized, which was kind of bizarre. the layout of the whole book reminded me of cosmo. every sentence i read made me want to punch those responsible in the face. snobby shit about the importance of using the filtration process that japanese hospitals do and so forth. what the fuck? whatever water you drink probably wasn't cooked, i don't think, but i guess i don't really know. i'm probably preaching to the choir, that is, the six people i already know who might read this, but seriously people, just let folks eat what they want and don't be a dick about it. my sister made a great joke when i read a line aloud from the book: "you can spot a raw foodie (NOT MARKED!?!? FOODIE IS NOT A WORD!!! god dammit, spell check) in a crowded room instantly." "yeah, they'll be the person who isn't eating anything."
after that, my sister bought me a delicious beer at tria, which i mentioned like 8 months ago. it is a place with dank beer, cheese, and wine. i had a heavy seas hang ten, which is like an imperial dunkelweizen. this beer should not be, but it is. and it is pretty delicious. she had a dogfish head festina pesche, which is a fucking amazing summer beer with wide distribution. wherever you are, you can probably find it, and you should probably drink as much as you can the next time you are so hot as to be unhappy. it fixes that problem rather well.
i am currently drinking ten high. it is an alleged bourbon, sour mash and such. it is pretty fucking vile as far as i can tell. i am not sure if this is because i haven't been drinking much in the way of liquor in a long time, or if it is just that bad. seven a fifth, and that is pretty dirt cheap here. i probably shouldn't have bought it, but whatever. it was just a day where i didn't feel like doing much. the thing that sounded the best was to drink liquor and watch a comedic film, which i will do after i am done typing this.
as everybody probably knows, i was home for a while between the last post and this one too. not much to say about that, since everybody is pretty much up to speed. but thanks to everyone for being there and having a good time with me and making it a worthwhile excursion. i saw just about everybody i wanted to see save one or two. i did run into one major Issue, but i actually feel like i handled it really well. in fact, it may be my best handling of a Thing in like three years or something. my reactions throughout recent history haven't been renown for their efficacy or prudence exactly. so that felt alright. all in all, a successful journey, other than being too poor to go to rothbury, although my time during that tenure was top notch to be sure.
my visit to gun rue was followed by a visit of my brothers and father to the city of brotherly love. this also went alright in my opinion. it was kind of strange, because i had seen all those people for a couple weeks running up to the visit and wasn't bound to spend time with them the whole while, as they were fully capable of wandering about the city on their own or under the guidance of my sister. the significant outcome was that i acquired some delicious meals i did not pay for, along with some groceries and case of stone i.p.a.. all in all, a good time. an additional visit to tria occurred, much to my delight. they are currently offering the dankest of all potato chips. say what you want about chips, but if you say you do not like them you are probably lying. these are herbed or whatever and the dip features truffle oil. fucking dank. but the cheese of course was the real star, my personal highlight was a boerenkaas i had not seen the likes of since the fatherland. also a great cheddar and a somewhat funky brie, which was good but not really as much my thing.
in other news of good fortune, we made a good quizzo showing the other night, but not high enough to place for a gift certificate. however, we did win free beer as a team, and i was personally redeemed in the shout-out round. what causes a butterfly rash on the face centered around the nose and is an autoimmune disorder? attention house (the show not the electronic music genre) fans: it was totally lupus. i guessed, but it worked. not only is it funny because it was lupus, it is funny because i won a box of fruit snacks and a slightly misshapen decorative fruit, a "lemon". when i got back to my place, my buddy was all like, man, those fruit snacks are old. i disagreed. but they are monsters, inc. fruit snacks. that movie has been out some time. so long, in fact, that marketing tie-ins are also somewhat dated. these fruit snacks were like two months from expiration. although they were not expired, what kind of shelf life do fruit snacks have? pretty long, i'm thinking. so yeah, they were pretty old. i have eaten most of them. they are much better than my last quizzo food win, which was macaroon cookies.
this saturday i am making my first foray into the notorious state of new jersey. i will be going to atlantic city. i will hopefully not gamble. or stay at a casino, or anywhere. no, i will go to the house fo blues, aka the house of westernized eastern religions. i will see the mighty clutch. it has been a while, and i am excited. unfortunately, it is a very large bill, in terms of bands and ticket plus silly charges. originally bad brains was going to play and that excited me but they are not listed anymore. i am also concerned over the fate of the hammond b3 player as he has not been on the last two tours without any announcement from the band. well, whatever, at least clutch will headline, and that's more than they have done in this a longstanding stronghold of the band since i have moved to it. i will probably tell you all more than you want to know about it later.
my current internet obsession is the brick testament. if you have not availed yourself of this business yet, it comes highly recommended. it is a good portion of the bible which is illustrated. but see, the illustrations are all pictures of impeccably designed lego scenes. it is an impressive obsession that this person has shared with us all via the internet. i have a friend who has not read the bible, but i showed it to him and he got hooked. i do not think that this makes me an evangelist, but i really believe that people should read the bible. it is compelling on many levels, and at the least some selections make for intriguing reading. if you have dealt with the bible for a couple decades like many people i know, this presentation is simple amusing to the max.
i continue to listen to an awful lot of the avett brothers. i cannot say enough good things about this band. they make simple music, but they do what they do so well. i really consider it to be something that would appeal to more people than a lot of what i listen to. if you have not heard this band and cannot be bothered to somehow make it happen on your own but would like to listen to them, let me know. i will gladly facilitate expanded appreciation of these people and their music, because it is absolutely amazing and surprisingly unique.
that most of what i have to say i think. it is now time to watch a funny movie, which is what i have wanted to do all day. i think i will watch best in show because i have not seen it in quite a while and it is one of the few movies i have. also, i got into an argument defending it the other night and realized i wasn't as familiar with it as i wanted to be. and so cheap liquor and mockumentary laffs it is. good day.

Foot mystery baffles Mounties

2008-06-23T14:48:00.000-07:00

this has been open in a tab in my browser for like two weeks or something. i wanted to make sure nobody missed it. please do your part to help the mounties. they... they need all the help they can get. especially when things are like this.
i know i have been too long in posting when the wounds referred to in the earlier one have healed (took forever) and i have picked up a new stupid injury. i am no fan of overhead lighting, and so unless more light is required i just use the stand lamp most of the time. the thing is, the lamp is located on the far end of the room from the door, and so i have to walk through a pretty dark room. normally, this is not a problem, as i have lived here for a while and the layout of various shit is pretty set in my mind. well, it has been kind of windy and something must have happened to the pbr 40s i use to keep the door from blowing shut because the door hadn't completely closed but it did make it like a third of the way. the outcome of this was that i walked directly into the side of the door. with my face. i have like a half-inch cut above my right eyebrow now. i wasn't like running to go downstairs and go to bed or anything, but i hit that fucker hard.
i don't know why it has been so long. mostly laziness i guess. i have done a few things. i currently have a ps3 in the room where i would normally do this, and that is probably a factor. there is a public defender lady character in gta4, and someone who worked on the game must have gone to law school. because i know like thirty of those chicks. i haven't been playing the game much lately because i am stuck on a couple of missions that require me to drive a motorcycle, and i am about as good at that in-game as i imagine i would be in real life.
i went to pittsburgh last weekend to see the avett brothers. i had probably heard a couple dozen of their songs once or twice a piece, and enjoyed it, but the show really blew me away. i have never seen such an enthusiastic crowd at a venue that wasn't selling booze. it was at some arts fest thing that runs a few weeks, but a couple thousand people were at the stage for the show. there was a beer tent type thing way off on the outskirts of the event, but you couldn't take your beer out of a cordoned-off hundred square foot or so area. not ideal. but i didn't need to waste money on overpriced crappy beer anyway. they played for quite a long time, and all night it kept threatening to storm. we felt a few drops and saw some lightning and heard some thunder, but it never happened. right when we got back to the parking garage, though, the floodgates opened. pretty impressive timing. in any event, those guys brought it in a big way. i wasn't sure how well it would translate live, but it couldn't have been any better. i would say it is the best show ive seen all year, but tlg last month still takes the cake for me personally.
i also enjoyed pittsburgh itself. they apparently do not like to be considered a midwestern city, but they totally are. it is a pretty big city though. not like philly big or chicago big, but big. it had a good feel to it though. and a shit-ton of bridges. and like no normal bridges for smaller rivers; they were all suspension bridges. it was kind of strange to see short bridges like that. they were all also painted an ugly shade of yellow. i think most shades of yellow are kind of ugly, though. went down to the point, which is where all three of the rivers come together. there was a really kick-ass fountain, and an historic fort. most of the park was closed off though, for no apparent reason. lots of inexplicable fencing. it is not like we did extensive sight-seeing or anything, but from my limited impression of the city, i liked it.
the drive between here and there was another thing too. central pennsylvania is pretty damn beautiful if you ask me. it has a real novel feel for me since everything back home is so damn flat by comparison. the route we took kept us closer to the poconos, and so things were kind of mountainous. forests always look nice, but they look even sweeter when you get to see them presented on a slant where you can really appreciate the sheer number of trees and then the sheer number of leaves. the roadkill was different too. couple of porcupines, and way more deer than i ever saw back home. we hit some pretty huge bugs that left like silver-dollar size splatters on the windshield. there were so many cicadas at some points that you could hear them clearly buzzing even with the windows down and the music up at 70 mph. it is a really fucking long state though, just keeps going and going. when i go on long rides i always wonder what all those people who live in the sticks do for a living.
on the course of the drive i also had my first full-fledged sheetz experience. a sheetz is kind of like a wawa but they all have gas and the food is better. for those unfamiliar with both sheetz and wawa, allow me to elaborate. they are kind of like really good gas stations, you know the ones that have been redone in the last ten years and are always super well-lit and and way too much selection of everything. but they also have like a made-to-order deli. but it is not just like sandwiches; they have like a grill and a fryer too. so the food is actually better than fast food and way cheaper. overall, a pretty good package. i just can't believe that this concept hasn't caught on nationwide. i mean it is a proven business plan, and it is super simple. the ordering is all touch screen and stuff. just seems like a great idea to me. hell, in other locations they could probably even have beer. that would be about as much as one could reasonably expect from a convenience establishment.
other than that journey, i don't know. i've been working some. it is tough when you don't have to go anywhere and accountablility is not what it might be. i might even get paid sometime. looking forward to that for sure; it has been a long time coming. i did go out for lunch with the prof and the other research assistant, who just happens to be the girl from my class that i have complained about on here a few times. she was actually super decent in this context. the food was pretty good; mexican cuisine here is not at its best. i had chicken enchiladas with mole sauce. not like mole the animal, like moe-lay. they were pretty good but the sauce was a little much; just kind of overpowering. nice change of pace though. the appetizers were kick-ass, like these little mexican flatbread things with black beans, guacamole, and some sour cream. delish. they brought out the worst tortilla chips ever though. these were the shittiest (not marked, awesome) tortilla chips of all time.
that actually reminds me, i should mention for anyone who cares and doesn't know, i am going home soon, on like the second. i am looking forward to people most, but el matador tortilla chips are not far down on the list. it has been too long. they are gonna rock. this will be kind of different, because i am riding both ways and not flying at all. the trip is always shorter than i expect though, and i am not driving at all on the way there so it should blow by pretty quickly. riding back out also means i can haul my brewing equipment, and i am looking forward to that in a big way. i was originally going to go to rothbury, but i am too broke. i still expect to have a thoroughly decent time.
i learned the best word/phrase in the french language today: loup garou. this is french for werewolf. this amuses me to no end, i am not even sure why, but ever since i found out it keeps popping back into my mind. this is okay, because i usually chuckle. this is but one of the many delights dinosaur comics has brought me. if i wasn't so lazy, i would probably change my links so that qwantz was under funniest. if you've never taken the chance to check it out, you probably should. a girl from my class asked me about it once because she had separately noticed me and a couple people i know reading it at various low points in classes. i enthusiastically tried to sum it up: "it's great! philosophy, language, religion, all sorts of stuff! all with talking dinosaurs! the fact that the art never significantly changes makes it even better!" yeah, she just kind of gave me one of those 'okay, you're weird' looks. well whatever. dinosaur comics is the shit, and don't you forget it.
back to this going home thing for a moment. i will of course, miss my pretty kitties. but i think it would just be too much trouble to take them along, even if i am riding and not flying. i don't think they'd really like it. my sister and her boyfriend will be able to take care of them though since it is not like christmas when everyone leaves. the cats and and those two get along pretty famously though, so all should be well. it has stayed fairly hot and so i haven't seen a lot of the cats as they stay in the cooler areas downstairs. they just followed me up though, and i was kind of confused about it. i think i figured it out though. i shook a plastic dry roasted peanuts container, and they used to have treats we would shake that sounded like that. i should get these guys some treats again, i do love them so. on the other hand, their food is also damn expensive enough as it is. my food budget for a month is not so far from what it is for them. however, they do not require tobacco or alcohol or laundry or anything. or if they do this at least some of the stuff for them i do not have to pay for.
glad i could bring a few people up to speed. but most importantly, consider the foot mystery and those poor baffled mounties. they need you. most times, people like to say something about not being a hero. most times being bank robberies, that is. but now, i am here, telling you to be a hero. help the mounties crack the case.

compacts clause

2008-05-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

i am at school doing a few things, including sitting around and wasting time doing this. i have begun my summer job working as a research assistant for one of the profs i had last semester. i don't actually need to be at school to do most of the work, it seems, but i stopped by today in hopes of catching the prof i am working for. i wanted to ask him about registration, which closes today. he, of course, is not here. that's okay. the school is a strange place in the off-season. there are still a lot of people around. massive groups of asians. i have heard the front desk clerk expound upon the virtues of her lunch, a salad, at least four times. i have almost memorized the elements of the salad. lots of people just filtering through, too, some profs, some students, who knows what else. overall, not near as unbearable as it normally is. or maybe it just seems that way because i haven't been in for a couple of weeks. also on the good side is that the school no longer smells like a subway garbage can that someone puked in. i don't know if i mentioned this, but during the exam period the whole damn law building smelled awful due to repeated flooding related to problems with the heating and cooling system. fuckin' sweet is what that was. fortunately none of the rooms i took my exams in were egregiously foul; i walked past the room where people who were handwriting took the exams and about lost my lunch. strangely, i kind of appreciate the fact that this massive flaw in the structure developed at a totally inopportune time. it gives flavor to my law school experience. i bet you very few people i will meet from other schools will be able to relate similar terrible problems. go us.
anyway, like i said, i'm supposedly doing research. i know other people who are more or less doing the same thing. except all of them have like gone to these bullshit training sessions and have filled out some stupid paperwork and yeah. i am sort of concerned about the prospects of getting paid as i have not gone through any of this. i anticipate speaking with my hiring prof about this. on the other hand, i will be thrilled if i get to dodge the training session, because it is a lesson for people who do not know how to use a library. i know how to use a library. i wish i had a large library named after me so i could threaten people by truly claiming that i have a library and i am not afraid to use it.
my research seems to be pretty obscure. my top result for one of the things i am looking into, this agreement between some states and the province of manitoba, was a pdf of a memo that some senator sent to my prof when my prof worked in the state department a few years back. i don't know if he quit before he got an answer for this dude or what, but what the prof is asking me to do is pretty much what he got asked to do in this memo. not exactly, but kind of. the point is, i don't know how much i'm gonna be able to tell this guy that he doesn't alreay know, but i will try my best. my best includes sitting around and typing this. i don't know if i am on the clock or what or how people keep track or anything. whatever, i've sifted through a lot of bullshit already and i've had enough for the moment.
i am also waiting (oh man here comes the salad speech again, i should have remembered my headphones) to maybe hear back from another prof i emailed about this class he is teaching next semester. i kind of want to hear what he has to say before i click the final registration button. what do you know, after fighting with the always-problematic wireless for a moment, i got a reply. however, the reply says he forwarded the email i sent him to the other person he's teaching the class with and now i'm going to wait for the other guy to get back to him so he can get back to me again. got that? it was real important. i originally was just gonna try and register for it and see what happened, but judging by the tone of the reply it is probably a good thing i didn't. my special dispensation is pending, and probably will be while i write the rest of this post because this is pretty much what i am going to do while i wait. i've been meaning to update anyway. anyway, the class is a colloquium and there are only like 36 seats, so i probably won't get in anyway; i'm pretty low on the registration ladder. on the other hand, so many people here are so job-focused that they might not be interested in talking about law and human behavior from the viewpoints of various disciplines. sounds like fun to me.
god, here i am out of school for the summer and yet all i have to talk about is school. it just never stops. i have done other things, sort of. i went down to jam on the river on sunday because it was free due to some sort of scheduling problem and cancellations. it was good people watching but it was overall just kind of strange. i didn't go all day, just at the end. the whole thing was sponsored by captain morgan, which is pretty tacky and lame, but someone had to pony up the bucks. they had some pretty bizarre promotional stuff going on, including some dude made to look like captain jack sparrow moreso than the captain morgan on the bottle. that would be a strange job. they used the same lettering as bonnaroo, which makes me stop and be like, what? silly people, silly place. it was kind of cool to be right next to the water. the music wasn't bad but it could have been better. lotus is okay, but the first day was the flaming lips and the disco biscuits. i would pay 20 or 25 bucks to see either of those bands on their own at a venue, but not 45 to see them both at once in what amounted to a parking lot (first day was someplace different than second day). poor festival marketing on their part. i wonder if anyone has worked out the mechanics of the most profitable summer music festivals. i'm sure someone has; rothbury is definitely a clear channel event. i would be curious to hear the conclusions on what makes a successful festival though. there are so many every summer now, it is kind of unbelievable. some people and many bands actually call memorial day to labor day "festival season". it wasn't always like this, was it? was i just unaware? most of the big ones on the circuit have celebrated their tenth birthday, but i don't think any big ones are much older than that. i got a flier for a totally half-ass festival when i was leaving jam on the river, some place on the PA/OH border. they had nothing. no bands i had ever heard of on the actual bill (except one who gave me their cd at that TLG show) . i'm guessing most of it is pittsburgh or cleveland area bands. i don't know. the weird thing was that there was also a drum and bass/deejay stage and i had actually heard of a good chunk of those performers. strange to have a secondary stage (in a cave, too) with better-known acts than the primary stage. in summation, i am not going to that bullshit.
in other news, most of my friends from school have left for rome for the summer to take classes. i wish i was there, but it was not so practical. i am at peace with this. the upshot is that one of my friends has left his ps3 with me while he is gone, so i will be playing the shit out of gta4 for the next six weeks. i am looking forward to this. i was looking forward to it, anyway, when i tried to make it actually work. nothing doing. fortunately, someone else found the answer to my problem. the console was freaked because i was feeding it through a vcr, which it regards as a 6 year old might regard a record. turned out i had to just keep holding to power button down after i turned it on. of course. why wouldn't holding the power button down for an extra fifteen seconds reset the defaults? whatever, it works now, and part of the reason i hauled my ass all the way to school was to resist the temptation to keep playing it while i should be accomplishing a couple of other things. like typing this and downloading music while nominally stalled from accomplishing anything else as i wait and constantly refresh my inbox and achewood, which hasn't updated in like forty-eight hours and is threatening to send me into withdrawal.
last friday i neglected to check myself. consequently, i wrecked myself. pretty bad. i was actually carrying the remnants of a case, and therefore had strange hand positioning that led to some really strange back of the hand injuries. the real problem is my knee. not a real problem, like it was the day after, but it does not look so great. i'm just glad that it works; i couldn't walk so hot the day after. these things happen. but i am back at it. possibly related to this fall is the continuing decline of my venerable crocs. i think they might have to be retired to household use only, and i should probably get real-people sandals as well. i might do that on my way home from here, if i ever make it out. two hours until the registration deadline, will i get this email before then? will the day be saved or will the world end? the suspense is killing me. i should probably go have a cig.

penn christmas

2008-05-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

it is that time of the year. we've all witnessed the mounds of debris that accumulate following the end of the school year in the face of looming move-out-by dates. but i have seen nothing in this league. this isn't just grab some functional shit and hold a garage sale material; there are several things worth taking and keeping, including a bunch of shit that has literally never been used. i personally kept it to a minimum because i could easily imagine myself thinking things useful and deciding upon move-out that they are not so useful as to be moved. we spent very nearly all our time in front of one house with fifty feet of curb covered in crap, in some cases the general connotation of crap, and other cases the bad connotation kind of crap. thankfully no literal crap. strangely, one of the girls who lived at the house responsible for the pile and a friend of hers came out and poked around a little with us. they were chatting about how wasteful the whole thing is, which confused me as it was presumably partially their shit. turned out it belonged almost exclusively to other already-gone roommates. in any event, they were really nice and let us in to see if we could find anything else we might want. some things are better gotten from directly inside a house than off the curb on a day when it rained heavily in the morning and afternoon. we helped them clear out the fridges (yes, plural) and gave us most of the beer leftovers, few cans of bud/coors light, whatever it was free. i kept some ethernet cable, an extension cord, a wine key, and a flask. the flask is like new; probably used once. my buddy found it inside a bag inside of something else. you do have to sift to find the good stuff.
i wasn't interested in accumulating large items or additional kitchenware (TONS of it), but other people made some serious scores. one dude had a poker table, one of the nice ones with all the notches and stuff. he wound up with a set of what appeared to be almost never used golf clubs in a nice bag from the basement of this same house. not that i'm gonna golf, but that shit is worth a bunch of money. same guy also wound up with a hookah, also in the basement. one passerby enthusiastically seized on a bag of women's lacrosse goalkeeper equipment. at this point i was just standing around so i struck up a conversation with the guy. he explained that this was precisely what he had been looking for: padding he could vacuum re-mold. of course. he did not say what he was going to re-mold it into, and i should have asked. somebody else picked around everything for a long time and took only partially empty spice containers. overall, most of what was left around were household essentials, and the heart of the situation is that people decide they would rather purchase the same things over again in some form than move these things with them, for whatever reason. also a disturbing amount of books. that being said, we still did quite well. i helped haul a never-opened package that was a metal shelving unit from ikea, twenty liquor glasses (mostly margarita; now we have no choice but to have a margarita party - tough life out here), a never-used air mattress with auto-pump, a lava lamp in fine condition, a working cell phone with charger (discovered in the following manner: cell phone charger? fuck that, won't work with any phone we knew for sure, twenty minutes later find the cell phone, spend the next half hour finding the charger back), two ziplock bags full of change (these people were literally throwing money away, yes there were quarters), six miro prints in a nice informative laminated sleeve (in synchronicity (marked! fuck you spell check) news, the wikipedia link for the artist refers to steely dan at one point, and i'm currently playing countdown to ecstasy), some other random shit like garlic and shallots and flashlights and a shower clock, and a nifty collapsible handcart to help schlep it all of the few blocks back.
did finally manage to make it through finals at the end of last week if anyone wondered. went pretty well. the foodery did indeed pose the most perplexing situation on friday. it went well, and i am currently enjoying one of the selections, rock art's double esb. pretty good, not unlike a big ipa or a smaller double ipa, 80 ibus and 8 percent abv. only real difference is in the hops, not typical of american ipas. still have a double simcoe ipa in the fridge, looking forward to that.
the kensington kinetic sculpture thing was on saturday and we made it down there. the kinetic sculpture thing had nothing on baltimore, but the race was part of a larger artsy festival thing, which was alright. some serious hipster-watching time. some pretty decent art too, and also some ridiculous stuff for sale for too much money. got to see some parts of the city i hadn't before, and that would have been enough for me anyway. philadelphia brewing company was there, but unfortunately i didn't have any cash; there was also some aromatic food making me wish i had sold my books back earlier. when i did sell them i went to dock street, so all was not lost. anyway, the "race" was a fun thing to do on the first day of nothing to do in some time. it was also my sister's birthday and we went to a bar i enjoyed despite its suspicious location in old city. hoptimus prime on tap is an argument in its favor, but the lack of an unbearable douchebag quotient was most key. a good time was had by all.
i also found out that i did get that research assistant job with my property prof. knowing i have something is a huge load off, especially down to the wire like it was; found out minutes before my last exam. unfortunately i haven't heard back on details since responding to the offer, but i'm sure the guy is busy trying to grade some exams and raise some kids. in any event, i'm looking forward to it, and that is a pleasant change of pace from the cloud of uncertainty about what to do this summer. almost even looking forward to fall semester now that i get to choose a few classes. i spent i good chunk of today trying to get that figured out. one thing i really want to take has these bizarre prerequisite requirements which are basically that you took all the first-year courses and then like one of eight possible other things. i think that is bullshit; if any one of eight classes can qualify, how important can that background be? not important enough to keep me out of this colloquium is the answer to that. law and human behavior is the topic, and i can't think of a whole lot that i would rather study at law school.
technology update: i am getting a new phone. this one still fucks up constantly. it gets better sometimes and then just sucks again when i need it not to do so. i hate how reliant i am on the thing, but it has nonetheless become something i expect will work constantly and it bothers me when it does not. as for the computer, things seem to be going well. i can now just shut the screen and let it hibernate again; for a while i had to shut it down fully or it would start to drain the battery while claiming to be using ac power. unfortunately, i tried to use the computer in a somewhat clumsy state the other evening (mondays at the mill creek, i have returned) and something went wrong with the power supply. i tried to remedy the situation, one thing led to another, and the end result was that one of the prongs for the outlet part of the thing broke off. dismayed, i decided to deal with it in the morning. this morning i recalled when i originally took the computer in to the store. i brought my power supply just in case, and the guy told me i needed a new power supply and so on. he also told me i had to take my old one back with me, stating that it was my trash, not theirs. trash it might be, but fortunately the separable part of the power supply goes from the transformer to the wall, and that chunk from the old one combined with the main part of the new one has me in good shape. lucked out big time on that one.
tomorrow i still do not have any real work to do. i will try to clean some i think. if it is nice out i will probably make the trek to get another bag of outrageously priced cat food. maybe do a little grocery shopping. also hoping to get my first crack at grand theft auto 4. i don't care what anybody has to say about it, good or bad, i just want to play it. i am pretty sure it will rule. i haven't played regular video games in a while, so we'll see how it goes. not a bad agenda to have.

technolo-hah

2008-05-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

screw you, technology. fuck you. turnabout is fair play, after all. i'm sure most of you recall my recent delightful adventures surrounding the untimely demise of the power supply to my laptop. these things happen, i understand. but it just keeps getting better all the time. a couple days ago, my half-ass wireless provider announced that it would become no-ass, a.k.a. no longer provide residential wireless service. thanks, folks. maybe blowing all your money on an advertising campaign centered around bus stops for like six months wasn't the best call. on the other hand, it is probably not all their fault. this is, after all, "comcast country". they've got the building to prove it now. anyway, i've got a little less than a month before they stop offering service. i guess this relieves any worries i might have had about getting out of any possible service contract i might have agreed to (although my education has also informed me of several other possible defenses). however that all turns out, the old adage about things in threes held together here: my phone is now also fucking with me. the screen does not turn on when i open the phone, and none of the buttons are responsive. the end result is that i cannot call or text anyone. i apparently can receive phone calls, although i only got one and i expected another. i don't even know how i actually answered the one; the call time on it registered a zero and the phone may or may not have technically picked up when i opened it in response to the call. in any event, i am somewhat less than pleased.
in better news, school is over for the year at noon tomorrow. i couldn't have made it through this with a lot of support from all over, and i appreciate it. it has been one hell of a bullshit ride. hopefully things will close out alright tomorrow; signs point to yes. this is a pretty chilled out exam compared to the others; i get to bring a lot of shit in. the only thing is that we can bring in all the cases, and i am not going to. there was no book, but rather a copy-center supplement that was somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 pages and cost fifty bucks. i declined to purchase it, as none of the cases were edited and i can access all of them on lexis, which i did all semester long. i am by no means a perfect environmental steward, but the idea of printing 500 pages for one day where i would use something like one percent of them seemed pretty horrific. it also would have been a pain in the ass to print it all out. i typed up a synopsis for each case as part of my review, and hopefully that will be sufficient. we'll find out soon enough, i guess.
i'm just ready to be done at this point, and i'm glad that feeling didn't crop up so early this semester. last time, i was ready to be done from day one, and by the time exams rolled around i was sleep-walking through every day just ticking down the hours until i got to go back to some things and people i knew and loved in a place where i could feel comfortable as myself. people change constantly on their own in an organic way, but sometimes there is a marked discontinuity in one's life and the resultant identity crisis is a little more unbearable. in the immortal words of t-rex (the comic dinosaur, not the band), the ravages of puberty leave no-one unscathed. that is one thing everyone has to go through, but i think it is comparable to some extreme changes people go through at other points in their lives. not that i've done any growing up recently, but i do know that when i came here i had a lot of problems just making it through each day and i don't feel that way anymore.
i've been doing a little more simple cookery lately, and i do enjoy that. nothing wild because that would require a couple investments i cannot afford to make right now. but i was fixated on making a couple things recently. for some reason i really really wanted veggie tacos. for like a couple days, until i just had to do it. i almost relented and made real ones but i couldn't find the frozen ground turkey i always use, so veggie it would be. there is some boxed dry mix i used to get and use back home, but i couldn't find it out here, so i went with one of those fake beef things that looks like the frozen ground turkey, all in that tube thing. textured soy protein or whatever, beats tofu in my book. they turned out great. today i made a heady delish pizza with pesto, six cheese blend that did not have enough fontina, and capicola (prosciutto HOLY SHIT I SPELLED IT RIGHT is too expensive). that's alright, i love capicola. i left it in just a touch longer than i would have liked, but it turned out just fine. i have way too much cheese, but garlic bread was on sale so hopefully i can work it to throw the cheese on the bread at the right time in cooking so as to fully toast the bread without burning the cheese. the mixture of frozen and refrigerated goods is tricky business, for me anyway. i've got some tomato sauce that has to go, and bread with red sauce is a fine meal in my book, so no complaints about all that.
the never-ending quest for good music continues, as always, with moderate success. you know, ups and downs, strikes and gutters. some dude gave me a fairly professional cd at the show last week (hey! i'm missing a show right now!). i figured i'd check it out; the last time someone at a show gave me a cd of a band i didn't know anything about it was back forty (i'm listening to an old one of theirs right now - opening for smokestack, the ann arbor band that couldn't miss but did). it was considerably less professional, but the content was far superior to what i wound up with last week. some band called the big dirty, mediocre funk-rock semi-jazzy fusion thing. vocals are thankfully minimal, as they are totally atrocious. if they want to get rid of these cds, they should probably keep giving them away. fortunately, the archive has provided me with some more than listenable material. the current new pick is SeepeopleS. i thought it was a pretty dumb name, but they have a bit of a buzz going on their behalf these days, so i figured i would check them out. i'm satisfied. what they do isn't the most original thing i've ever heard, but i think they do what they do well. contemporary neo-psychedelic indie rock/pop. easy to pick out the massive radiohead/flaming lips/perry ferrel influence, but there is some other stuff going on there too. i can dig it, worth checking out if you are a fan of the influences as it is somewhat derivative. in my book, that doesn't damn a band when they pick a certain part of the breadth of someone else's work and go deeper, which is what these guys do. the guy sounds great with a ton of vocal effects going, but without them he veers into trite nasal indie bullshit sound. the musicianship is unimpeachable, however, especially the drumming, which is not usually something that jumps out at me. the band overall has a nice big sound with massive sonic waves cresting and crashing, mostly courtesy of the keyboard work. worth a try if you're looking for something along those lines.
i realize some people have a freshly functional record player to revel in, but i am surprised no one has had anything to say about the owlandbear link from the other day. there is some seriously good music on that site, and something for just about everyone that you'd have a hell of a time finding anywhere else. if you didn't look, maybe you should, i'm just sayin'. and while you're looking, also check that foodery link to witness the sheer selection. choosing will hopefully be the most difficult thing about tomorrow.

one about religion...

2008-05-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

or about washing your car... actually it's about opening a pair of curtains. this is how bruce dickinson introduces "revelations" on live after death, and it has always cracked me up. actually listening to the studio cut off piece of mind right now, but i was reminded, one of those classic pieces of banter that doesn't quite make sense. my favorite bruce intro, though, is definitely for the rime (not marked - rock on spell check, let that old school stuff slide) of the ancient mariner: "the moral of this story is this is what not to do if a bird shits on you". if you know the poem but not the adaptation i highly suggest you avail yourself; you'll be surprised at the faithfulness maiden has to the original. in any event, this is a great album and i'm glad i threw it on, just one great track after another. next thing you know i'll go back to actually introducing myself as metal.
so i guess tonight is friday. overall it doesn't so much feel like it. more like a sunday night, as i have a lot of work to look forward in the next couple of days. i am absolutely exhausted. on the other hand, some friday is maintained by the fact that i have given myself the night off, more or less.
i guess i sort of gave myself the night off last night too, although not as much of that night was off. i had spent the last few days destroying my brain with constitutional law, trying to recall all i had done through the semester, memorize case names and holdings. like i said before, there was a ton of shit to cover. i spent most of yesterday trying to compose my one side of one printed page of notes i was allowed to bring in. i went with eight point font and the slimmest margins the printer would let me have, something in the neighborhood of .16 inches or something. i thought that was extreme enough, but you should have seen the shit some other people brought in. all rigged up with with like four columns, some serious gnat's ass condensed fonts, like 5.5 point. one dude had managed to fit in something about all ninety nine cases we were technically assigned. the concern, though, for most people was the almost equal amount of cases the prof mentioned in passing in class, which he explicitly said we should also know. a lot to freak out about. so i did my best to cover as much ground as possible. people get so ridiculous about these things, a buzz was going around that one of the three essays was going to be about executive power and the war on terrorism and military tribunals. of course, even though everyone was so sure it would be on there, it wasn't. i hope those motherfuckers spent all their time on it; it was one of the few things i left off my one page of notes. look, just because a recent past exam or two had it on there, it doesn't follow that it will be on this one. if anything, i would think that makes it less likely. profs put old exams on file so that students can see the sort of questions they ask, not so students know what questions will be on the exam. on the other hand, like i said, i tried to cover an awful lot of ground over the past few days. almost all for naught. the purview of the exam was shockingly narrow; all three questions dealt with fundamental liberties under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment to some extent. fortunately, this was something i understood pretty well and had included some good points on in my notes. i really feel like i rocked the first question, which was actually half and not a third of the grade, so that's good. the other two questions were alright too, just not as clear cut as the first one. overall, i feel good about it, probably even better than any exam at law school thus far.
and it's a good thing too, because as i mentioned i kind of took last night off. as threatened, i went to that tea leaf green show rather than spend the dying hours of last night trying to cram more shit into my brain. damn, did i ever make the right call. it is a good feeling. nothing i would have done last night would have left me any better off during the exam than i was. i went into the show kind of nervous, though, and not just about my possible misuse of time. no, i was worried about the show, and, naturally, the set list. my buddy who has seen considerably more shows at this venue than i have made extensive claims of curfew limitations, possibly as early as eleven. plus, their most recent show was in delaware and it was only one set. although it was a short show, it featured a few nuggets i had reason to believe would probably not surface two shows in a row. however, they had not played what is probably my favorite cut and certainly one of their more enduring and popular tracks in a few days, so i was hopeful for that if nothing else. so curfew concerns and all i went in. the opening band was pretty cool, bunch of veteran musicians. six people, probably in their sixties, although it is hard to tell. being a longtime touring musician (especially coming out of the sixties and inhabiting the fringes of what is now the "jam" world), i feel, takes a certain toll that makes one look perhaps older than one is. one dude in this band was like neil young status haggard, and a couple others weren't too far off. regardless, it was awesome to see people like that having an absolute ball doing what they do, and presumably have been doing for decades. one dude played a phenomenal pedal steel, which is a sound i will not tire of in the foreseeable future. skilled and entertaining as they were, they were not the band i showed up to see, and given curfew concerns i grew anxious as they went about fifteen minutes over their allotment (i know because they said so). i figured if time constraints were real, the equipment change-out would be expedient, but no, still the customary half-hour or so. i couldn't wait for the main event to get rolling. and then it did. and it was pretty excellent; i know i was psyched. even with a favorite band, though, everyone has some songs they dig more than others. the ones that fall into my ideal category were not dominating the set, but it was still great, and actually gave me more appreciation of the songs that don't fit into my top twenty five for the band. the way things were proceeding, i was pretty sure they were moving toward winding things up, and eagerly awaited the inimitable "sex in the 70s", the aforementioned crown jewel of the repertoire, but to no avail. at the end of the set the band broke out the old companion song to one that hasn't taken a vacation from recent shows, and that was a nice treat, but it looked to be about all and i staked my hopes on the encore as i nervously glanced at the time on my phone. as they finished up the breakout tune and the guitarist approached the mic, i expected the perfunctory thank you and have a good night, but instead heard the magic words "stick around, we'll be right back". two sets it was going to be after all, no curfew kibosh. i was so jazzed i could hardly stand it, and when they went back on there was not one millisecond of disappointment, and a lot more of what i had been hoping to hear. i particularly reveled in the sentiment of one of my particular favorites, "piss it away", given my present circumstances (even though the choice is mine/i make the wrong one every time). it was about all i could ask for, and when we got about as deep as we were gonna go, they launched into the one i had been betting on and waiting for. perfect way to close it out, i figured, and started to wonder about the encore. to my great delight, however, i had gotten out in front of things; the set had some gas in the tank and they made a slick transition into one of their older super funky quasi-disco numbers that once upon a time had been a common lead-in to the song they had just played. it sizzled like the crowd, total throw-down at the hoedown. but it was the encore that finally and conclusively melted my face. two tracks i hadn't dared hold out hope for, both delivered in blistering fashion. but that wasn't all, they sealed the deal with a great tongue-in-cheek thrash number called death cake (i used to be a love muffin... now i am a... DEATH CAKE! death cake motherfucker!). at that point i wasn't sure if i had made the right decision or not in foregoing study time, but i did know without a doubt that i had one of the best times i might ever have. the exam going good in the morning was the icing on, well, on the death cake, i guess. things gotta work out right sometimes, and this was perfect timing for just such an instance.
i am currently auditioning magic hat's newest seasonal. when i saw the label, i was initially confused but then recalled a visit to the website which specified the scheme i had not seen in practice: the same name for a beer that changes four times a year. there is a small part of the label that specifies the season, but always in the overall form of odd notion [season]. apparently the marketing folks at magic hat think it is cool to call four different beers the same thing, presumably as part of the broader goals of furthering specific branding and tapping into the market of people who will always try a new beer. i for one appreciate breweries doing seasonal things, as beer is quite easy to fit to some specific times of the year, and there is a fine tradition of doing so. on the other hand, i dislike the sacrifice of creativity in the name of marketing. i enjoy this beer and will have lots of great things to say about it in a moment, but these alleged seasonals are never very drastic, mostly just middle of the road stuff, albeit quite well done. the summer version is malty as all get out, a little syrupy for summer, but surprisingly roasty at first quickly moving to a lingering sweetness with a fruit juice sort of aftertaste. not as overdone as the apricot in number nine, and not as cloying, and somehow almost as sweet. i wouldn't be surprised if the recipes were mostly similar apart from what seems like some medium belgian in this one and the actual fruit flavor in no. 9. if not the malt bill, then almost certainly the yeast. flavorful and pleasant, but not in a specifically summery (not marked) way. the juxtaposition of the initial roastiness and relatively viscous body to the light, acidic sweetness after it is what makes this a worthwhile brew to check out. good beer, but i'm glad i bought a single and not a six pack, and that to me is the biggest indictment of its claim to summer. my personal favorite summertime beer is still the kolsch that goose island makes. i wonder i f i will be able to find that out here. whether i do or not, i'm sure there will be some other options available that i am as yet unfamiliar with. the foodery beckons. click the link that simply says 'beer' and it will be immediately apparent why. one more week...
also, this post was not about religion. i guess that is the punchline?

land of pleasant living

2008-05-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

not that the living has been all pleasant, or entirely unpleasant. although i am unsure if i am actually within the bounds of the land of pleasant living. i've been a fan of the phrase for a while, but only recently had it properly contextualized. like a surprising number of things in clutch tunes, this was a reference to something geographically specific, namely the label on the notorious national bohemian beer. the beer is a totally decent cheap beer, quite pabst-like, and somewhere in the neighborhood of ten dollars a case. something to be said for that. in any event, i'm sure the label has said that for a long time, and it was made in baltimore for a long time, but is now made in milwaukee, unsurprisingly. as a matter of fact, heileman makes it, along with such hits as carling black label and old style.
oh, but i was not in maryland to gather knowledge about clutch references or merely to purchase natty bo (i only recently discovered the beer is called national bohemian and not that), rather, i did indeed attend the kinetic sculpture race. it covered a lot more time and ground than i thought it would, and it was an awful lot of fun. day started off gray and cold but got really excellent just after noon or so. seeing an enormous pink poodle sculpture piloted in and out of a harbor by people dressed as marie antoinette is surreal in one of the finest ways possible. one of my favorite sculptures involved a giant blue wombat, but the best part was that the people piloting all played instruments while doing so, even in the water. had a small drum kit mounted and everyone else played some kind of a horn, couple saxophones and trombones, a trumpet, good stuff. the water was probably the most fun to watch, but i really enjoyed the next leg too, which was in this park that has a wikipedia page it turns out is not worth linking. anyway, the park has quite a hill, is huge, had something to do with a civil war battle, and most importantly has a sixty foot pagoda built at the top of the hill. and yes, you can go in and up to the top, and the view is amazing. and yet, somehow, that isn't where the one picture on that wikipedia page is taken from. yeah, i guess a camera is a decent thing to have and they're cheap now and such, but it is too late now. the good news is that plenty of other people do, and the official recap of this year's race includes some really awesome pictures.
so it turns out that baltimore is really quite close, especially with traffic on a cold, damp saturday morning. but i don't really know how much i want to go back soon except maybe to visit the really cool museum that puts the race on. granted, i saw a limited part of the city, mostly the inner harbor area, but i was pretty underwhelmed. everything looks like it got put up in the last twenty years or so, i kind of expected a more historical feel. i'm sure there is plenty of that too. and if i really wanted, i could probably also easily find locations approximated on the wire. only the view from the pagoda convinced me that the place is a for real city. i guess they went from about 950k people in 1950ish to about 650k by the 90s. ouch. and yet their benches proudly proclaim their current motto: baltimore - the best city in america. that is some bold shit. and honestly, i don't think some big ass business is gonna move to your city because all your benches talk about how awesome your city is. on the other hand, there is a lot of construction going on in the center part of the city, and population is starting to rise again, so they must be doing something right. i think mostly it's that the city had a huge harbor history that dissipated, but now that it has once again become fashionable to live downtown in a big city, they have some opportunity. being a harbor, they had a ton of abandoned warehouses to tear down and build over and got to skip a good portion of the painful gentrification process. but hey, i'm no urban planning expert.
i also ate in a waffle house for the first time on the way back. the food and service were both shitty, which seemed appropriate. it was a very small one and in kind of a nowhere town not too far from the MD/DE border. the most remarkable thing was the jukebox, which contained about an eighth or so of selections that were songs about waffle house, by waffle house. i wasn't really listening to what was playing while it was on, but it started skipping and this guy got up from the counter (which accounted for about 50% of the seating) and jostled it pretty violently, successfully shutting it up. he was kind of an interesting character: probably a couple years younger than me, 30 years younger than all the other people who conducted themselves as regulars, stuck in an in-between town with a mall, long hair lip ring slayer shirt bondage pants. but he was really pleased about smacking the jukebox and getting it to shut up. sort of like an inverse fonz.
the next day i had a good time in the name of cats. some friends held a backyard benefit for city kitties, a local organization that takes care of strays and gets them foster homes and such. good cause, good people, good times.
unfortunately all of these good things are happening in the midst of the valley of the shadow of death known as finals time. i finally had my first one tuesday. i was getting tired of waiting for them to start, but alternatively i should really wish for all the time possible given that i have an outrageous amount of material to cover. my next one is con law on friday and i think i read six or seven hundred pages of small point text for that this semester; a whole lot of shit to know. and the prof is real scholarly and is bound to have some pretty high expectations. also, he talked about as many cases we weren't assigned as ones we were, and i have no idea how much of that is expected. i will find out with brutality all too soon. even though it is going to be intense, i figured i really wasn't going to do myself that much good with the last four hours of thursday night, and so i am still going to go see tea leaf green. i am psyched.
my first exam was all rooted in one hypothetical factual scenario, which was really quite funny. involved this guy from delaware who had eaten tons of food for his whole life, so much that he had trouble getting ahead. then he discovers competitive eating and wins a couple local events when he finds out about a big time event on the PA border where the food is his favorite of all time, ham and cheese croissants. big prize of 50k, plus every participant gets five free hams, as the event was naturally sponsored by the Happy Ham Corporation. so this guy really wants to gear up for the event, but he can't afford enough sandwiches to train, so he gets a sponsorship with a NJ deli. so he's practicing constantly by eating tons of ham and cheese croissants. one day, his training is derailed by a new flavor of ham, honey hickory, which disgusts him and he can't eat. he's freaking out and he calls the happy ham corporation to ask what ham will be used at the competition and they tell him original, so he's all set. the day arrives, and he's ready to rock, and then he smells it: the dreaded honey hickory ham. he tries to compete but he just gets nauseated and falls way behind. he knows he can't win and he gets super pissed and starts screaming at the CEO of happy ham, pelts him with sandwiches and ethnic epithets. so i had to explain why the case could be in federal court in PA first of all. then it was on to a question of if convicted assault, did the dude forfeit his free hams based on a participation contract demanding contestants comport themselves with dignity and honor (no clear answer on that, actually, hard to say), and all sorts of good stuff like that. so yeah, law school...
speaking of food, i had some incredibly dank dinner last night. i wish i could say that i made it, but i did not. fried artichoke ravioli with one of the most serious sauces i have ever encountered. check it out: sauteed onions and mushrooms, quart of whole milk, pint of heavy cream, probably around six ounces of gorgonzola, half a bottle of cheap champagne, and four pears sliced up all thin, and some requisite low-key things like salt, pepper, and of course a little old bay. but damn. it was so delicious. the champagne and pears lightened things up nicely; it wasn't too rich but instead perfectly savory. man, i am making my mouth water.
i have recently discovered a fairly remarkable repository of live music, leaning much more toward the hip than the hippie. i know some of you all would get excited about some of it, and other things everyone can get excited about. everything from neil young and tom waits to califone, band of horses, and bonnie prince billy. and many more. also the wilco archive is bigger than everything else put together (80 gigs or so vs. 76 - lots of tunes here folks). i think just about everybody could find something to treasure from this trove. and for all you slackers, guess what - you don't even need bit torrent. everything is lossless too. there are a few attractive-looking studio sessions on there as well (including dylan's '65 BBC sessions), if you're not much for the live thing, but just about every band i've heard of on the list there is respected as a live performer.
shit. i have so much to do tomorrow. doable (not marked) though, just have to memorize a couple hundred years of constitutional jurisprudence is all. preferably by 7 pm or so. this also means getting up on time. i hate doing that. but tomorrow i get to wake up early and review what i learned about executive power and the war on terror. definitely the way to start your day, like spilling coffee: painful, upsetting, and jarring.

shenanigans

2008-04-30T18:43:00.000-07:00

well it has been a while but it was nearly about to be a whole lot longer. yesterday featured a computer crisis of sorts. it started at school when i went in for a review session; computer would be all plugged in and then somehow nonetheless lose all power. i figured something wasn't plugged in right, messed around for a minute, and it was fine. went home and it kept doing the same thing, getting progressively more and more touchy. i made the mistake of letting all the power run out before i grabbed everything i needed off of it. fortunately, i was able to get it to charge up by pinning the notebook against myself and firmly pressing the ac power connector thing into the jack. problematic, but i managed to run the power up to about 20% of the battery; enough time to get things off it should i need to. given the nature of the problem, i was reasonably certain that the power supply was the offending piece in the puzzle. i wasn't happy about the prospect of buying one, but better to buy a power supply than have to send my computer off for four weeks to get repaired while i kind of need it to study for/take my exams. so buy a power supply it was.
or it was supposed to be. i walked to a nearby computer refurbishing sort of place and explained my situation. the clerk took my laptop and immediately stuck a small screwdriver in the ac jack and wiggled it around, claiming the jack was loose and that was my problem, not the power supply. i wanted to plug a different power supply in to see if it would work, but they were not having it. the original clerk handed off to someone who seemed more in charge and he repeated the process with a pen instead of the screwdriver. told me it would have to bee opened up, very costly he said. well, shit. i wasn't about to shell out for all that cause the computer has a warranty that would cover it. at least i had charged it up, i figured, can always get what i need even if i have to send it off someplace and try and find a way to make due during a time where making due is not an ideal approach; something more is required. but i didn't have a lot of options. i went back home and called the circuit city number on my warranty, which was about as far from helpful as could even be imagined. every path through the automatic routing left me with some other 800 number. the hell with it, i figured. the warranty type lists it as 'walk in' so no matter what i find out, i obviously need to walk into a circuit city someplace at some point. so find a circuit city i was. luckily i do have some driving friends out here, and they were good enough to get me way out to the northeast of the city where the closest circuit city was.
after some minor traffic/directional confusion (the roads up there are all fuckin' slanty, you know, like lake drive in gun rue, no perpendicular intersections at all) we found the place. i busted out the computer again and made my case, this time explaining i believed the problem was with the jack as i had been told. the clerk, who did a good job, immediately rustled up the appropriate jack adapter to test for power over a the power supply he had at the desk. much to my delight, the lights came on - it was the power supply after all. that is the good news. the bad news is that yeah, the jack is kind of loose, but it is sure as hell working for now. also, i still had to buy a new power supply for the time being. the warranty actually covered my power supply though, so they are ordering me a new one, and when it comes in i get that one for free and i can allegedly return the one i had to drop $130 on. this is a good thing. so fingers crossed that the jack doesn't wind up failing me in the middle of an exam. i think i'll be alright. even if that did happen, the exam set-up is designed to handle it i think. i don't know. and i hope i don't find out, really.
so i am home and so is my dear computer. i felt excruciatingly crippled while it was not working. i didn't even know what to do with myself while i killed time waiting for my ride. played some records and some wii, so i guess i got by. but i do realize how dependent on this thing i am. so it goes. in addition for all the enjoyment it provides me, it is also the site of the ongoing battle of the procedure known as civil. that is my first exam. the upside is that we didn't cover half the amount of material we probably did in say con law, but what we did do in civ pro is disgustingly arcane and dry. super dry. dry like trying to eat a dozen saltines in under a minute with no water. apt analogy in that both rapid saltine consumption and civ pro are serious choking hazards. i should check the inside cover of my textbook, i bet it has a warning about not being left near children. warning - book is not a toy. although mine kind of looks like it was used as a soccer ball at some point. note to self - a used book costs the same no matter how used it is or is not. i have probably seen the last of used books for my tenure in legal education though; maybe a couple for the small number of big classes i wind up in, but i hope to mostly be in classes small enough that no one has bothered publishing a book for them. some of them will probably have skinny books that get reprinted every year though, and those will indeed be costly. so much to look forward to.
in other news, i am done with drum. had it, totally. they changed the cut of the tobacco a while ago, and it is my personal belief (rooted in sufficient experience) that not only does it not hand-roll as well, but it also causes it to dry out quicker. as some of you may know, shortly after pouch tobacco dries, it inevitably gets pulverized into tobacco powder. not an advisable source of nicotine. so fuck you drum. you chased me away with your fifty as opposed to sixty papers and pandering to the machine-roll crowd. today, though, i didn't even have any halfzware options (language note - halfzware is dutch and means "half-heavy"). not even (shudder) bali. so i went with samson bright blend, which is essentially, i dunno, quarter heavy? reminds me of american spirit roll in aroma, but is dissimilar in a superior manner to other aspects of said roll. no updates for a week or two, and this is what i have to tell you. i bet it is really tough to get a job as a tobacconist these days. probably you have to be a cigar person, and i'll pass on that business. one of the guys i know from drexel law did that for a few years, maybe i will ask him about employment projections in the tobacco sector.
i am hoping to make it to baltimore this weekend for the kinetic sculpture race. originally i had hoped to go down early and catch hot buttered rum, a pretty good SF bluegrass band. people we know play in an exceptionally entertaining band called hoots and hellmouth (gah i feel dirty linking to myspace), and they are opening and could possibly get us guest list spots. this, however, was before i lost a day's worth of study time to the whole ordeal with the power supply, so we shall see. mostly now i am hoping to make it down there at all, and i suspect that i will, for good or ill. i will of course let y'all know how it turns out. it is things like that where i really wish i had a camera, because guaranteed there is gonna be some cool stuff to see. i'm sure plenty of other people feel the same and have cameras though, so the event will be more than adequately documented. philly is trying to start their own up in kensington this year, and i would like to see that as well and compare the two. also want to get to kensington to check out yards or philadelphia brewing company; i can never remember how that split worked out and who wound up where with what building and who is brewing what on the other's premises. anyway, should be a good time. i believe it is also my sister's birthday then. also, the first day after my last exam. yes, good times in the works. now to make it from here to there.
i did manage to squeeze in quite an evening's entertainment this past friday as well. for all the things i like about my go-to watering hole, i usually do not intentionally go there to see a band. this was the exception. phish cover band i had heard good things about. say what you will, but i certainly had a hell of a time. i have heard quite a few bands play there, and the sound has never been better. they were pretty tight and really focused, did a great job executing some of the trickier moments in what they played. i guess it was the bass player's first real show with them, but the dude could have fooled me. not overbearing, but always solid and audible in the mix. last friday was also my last day of class, so the show was really towards the end of what served as plenty of a self-congratulatory afternoon. for all of that, i could probably give you a set list from memory. just can't help myself sometimes.
my employment prospects have recently improved from none at all to something i would like to do that i might actually get to do. just a research assistant gig for one of my profs, but i really like the stuff he works on and we had a pretty good talk the other day. sounds like he would actually have plenty of work for me to do, which is also a plus since some research assistant jobs at law schools do not involve quite so scholarly a professor. i was glad our discussion went well though because i have not gone out of my way to make waves in property, which is what i have him for. on the other hand, i have had the answer whenever he calls on me, so that bodes well. he is always trying to pull something, asking me when he catches me yawning or looking otherwise possibly disengaged. no man, i'm there, i'm just not going to waste everyone's time with what i think. we have plenty of other people doing that already. oh, and check this shit out. a couple of other people naturally put in an app of some sort with this professor for this gig. one of them happens to be that voice-like-nails-on-a-chalkboard harpy who has plagued my education all year. here is the best part though: that bitch ALREADY HAS a fucking research assistant job with another prof. i know because one of my friends also already has a similar job, and they all had some orientation thing recently, which is how i found out yet another factor in this broad's rampant douchebaggery. this really takes the cake. my friend shows me an email send to the listserv for the people who have these sorts of jobs this summer, and sticking out of the list like some lighthouse of annoyance is this chick's email address in all caps. i shit you not. all caps. no one else puts one capital in their whole address. i just keep telling myself that other law schools i could have gone to probably have even more of her. what the hell, people.
speaking of which, one more thing. this story is one of those things that is so egregious one cannot help but have a few things to say. i have to say, thanks bureaucracy (man did i have tough time spelling that). way to suck like you are supposed to. nothing is ever anyone's fault. sorry ma'am, i have orders -- i could lose my job. and i can't lose my job, so you are losing your kid. if you still didn't read the story, you should. it is about a professor at u of m who bought his seven year old a mike's hard lemonade at a baseball game because he didn't know there was such a product as lemonade with alcohol. it gets better from there. always does.
straw is still really freaked out about some fireworks that went off like twenty minutes ago, and so i am going to call it good here and try to soothe him. i can't blame him; they caught me just as off-guard.

i read the news today, oh boy

2008-04-19T17:45:00.000-07:00

news, that is, of the haircut! and oh boy, indeed. great stuff. definitely dig the packaging/presentation as well, very cool. news of the haircut is a great title, but if i was gonna pull one line out of the whole package it might be sweet jesus on a lazy susan. it is not as good of a title, but damn if i don't love it. if anyone is confused, news of the haircut is peter berghoef's (witte piet under my links) latest publication. mr. berghoef is royalty of holland mi, proprietor of the berghoefer bavarian resort, and inaugural poet laureate of my country. he may or may not whup everyone's ass at scrabble tonight. stooges!?
yesterday was a beautiful day. a beautiful day to get sunburned. i observed a rather large-scale free mumia rally. it was by far the best-attended event i have observed, which is kind of cool and kind of strange. naturally, it was also the most diverse. all ages, all races, lots of different organizations represented (lgbt for freeing mumia included). also the best rhythm section i've ever seen at something like this. things went slowly, but without a serious hitch. i was kind of nervous about the rig they had set up for sound: at the front of the march was a pickup with a pa and speakers, which was too much to for the vehicle to power on its own, so they had a generator. the generator, however, was gasoline powered and in the back of a minivan behind the pickup, so there was an extension cord from the generator to the pa in the truck. it all worked out in the end. there was a small counter-demonstrating contingent, but they had as many police for as them for a line between the demonstrators and their counterparts. everyone was well-behaved for the most part; officers hauled one or two people off to the side with harsh reprimands; people who had caught the march along its route and were hassling participants. the officers were interested in keeping the peace, and they did a good job. really commendable work considering they were assigned to guard people demanding the release of a person many of them probably believed murdered one of their co-workers. it takes a lot of patience to guard people who are berating you and your work over loudspeakers. probably the most extreme freedom of speech i have witnessed: talking shit on the founding fathers over the pa in front of independence hall. anyway, we were out there a long time, and i have some hilarious sunburn. my face is ok because of the neon green baseball hats we wear, but my neck is another story. my head looks like it was poorly photoshopped onto my body. there is also a funny break in the burn down my spine where my ponytail was.
i read a fantastic graphic novel the other day called three fingers. i blew through it pretty quick, but i might read it again and spend more time looking at the artwork. it is set in a universe akin to the one in roger rabbit, where the toons are actual beings who act in pictures. but this is way darker. everything is told sort of obliquely, to avoid copyright infringement, but you can tell what the idea is supposed to be. mickey mouse = ricky rat, and so forth. the basic gist is that ricky rat was the first successful toon film actor, and he had three fingers from a birth defect. when he gets big, other toons try to get in on the act, but none are nowhere near as successful. the superstitious toon community chalks it up to ricky's having three fingers, and toons begin to get fingers amputated in an effort to bring good luck. it seems to work, as after the practice starts other toons begin to gain comperable fame, but only those with three fingers. the whole novel is set forth in sort of a documentary fashion set decades down the line, with different figures weighing in on whether the film studios invented/encouraged/condoned the practice. pretty friggin excellent overall.
i also indulged in a film the other night, which was also quite entertaining. quirky movie called fido. set in like 50s america after a massive zombie war. the idea is at some point an electronic collar was developed that quells the natural zombie appetite for human flesh and now zombies are used for manual labor and kept as servants/house pets. pretty well put together flick, only one questionable plot point, but very entertaining and intriguing stuff altogether. i don't think it was even more than 90 minutes long, but they got enough characters in to offer a few perspectives on what the movie was trying to get at. set design and makeup were top notch. given that i hadn't ever heard of it, it still must have had a pretty decent budget. i don't know if anyone famous was in it, because i am bad at knowing those sorts of things. in any event, it is a good movie to watch because it is both thought-provoking and amusing. i am a sucker for excursions into contemporary conceptions of 50s era america/americana. some seriously bangin' tunes on the soundtrack that i was unfamiliar with too, which is always a bonus.
earlier in the weekend, i experienced something for the first time in several years: being at a party the cops put the kibosh on. it really didn't seem likely for most of the party, but on the other hand i got there kind of early. i didn't really meet anyone, but there were several people who i already knew there. the party was mostly work-based, and so the vast majority of people who showed up knew each other and probably didn't plan on branching out much. in any event, it was a pretty good time. good music, good company, good amount of beer, even if the beer itself is not overwhelming on its own. nothing wrong with it either, though. we took our own carling black label, but there was a healthy amount of pabst in the fridge as well. i also ate lightly salted potato chips for the first time. i don't recall ever seeing those back home, but every brand out here definitely includes lightly-salted in its line. they're not all bad, mostly just taste more like whatever oil they are cooked in. anyway, the cops showed up at some point, and were there for so long that there were two separate occasions where i fully believed they had left but in reality they had not. the good news is that no one was ticketed for anything as far as i am aware. really, though, even after everyone got there (i think a lot of people got out of work at midnight or so) it wasn't all that wild and crazy. the small back porch was completely packed, but it still couldn't have been all that loud. i guess it only takes one noise complaint sometimes. this party featured a boston terrier, for which i was thankful. damn was she excited. much to my surprise while attempting to locate the restroom, two more boston terriers had also shown up. i like to think that they were friends of the dog and the dog invited them; none of the humans brought the other two along. because hey, if dogs can pull that off, my cats should be more than capable of the same.

this type of shit calls for bay and thyme...

2008-04-16T16:59:00.000-07:00

in case you somehow missed this recent mts, you probably shouldn't have. i was gonna post it but i put in the html thing from the site and it doesn't fit right on the blog, so link it is. pretty money comic if you ask me, up there with the failure to protect the neck one, which is probably still my favorite.
and that is the only notable news i have. naw, not quite, but nothing earth shattering. let me see, i've done some really good porch sitting. that is indeed a pastime i am rather fond of. they had the flea market again, but there weren't as many places with vast record selections this time. that is not to say that there still weren't way more records i wanted than i could afford, but it is to say that i didn't get anything i went to find. i really wanted after the gold rush, and some wannabe hipster (spell check does not mark either of those two words) fuck pulled it out of one of the two remaining boxes i hadn't pawed through after flipping through thousands of lps. and he handed it to his even more wannabe friend and advised him to pick it up. i was displeased. the good news is that the stand with the best records was actually just a field operation of the record store like five or six blocks away, and i bet they have at least one more copy back there, i just have to go. still. i thought about seeing if the dude would trade me for the original press t-rex electric warrior i found, but even my relatively minimal experience with record supplies led me to believe i should just hold what i had. ah well. i also failed to find a copy of ANY steely dan album i wanted. i couldn't even find any of the ones i had. what gives? i really need the royal scam. get along, kid charlamagne. in addition to the t-rex, i scored nice copies of john wesley harding (now playing), american beauty, obscured by clouds (can finally retire my other beat-to-shit copy), and allmans live at the fillmore east, which has that excellent side of whipping post. all this for thirty bucks or so, more or less a successful experience.
i got some brief legal observing in the other day. strange little event undoubtedly inspired by that improv group everyone is going on about who did the thing at grand central and the cell phone symphony. this was along the lines of the grand central thing, having people freeze and stuff, but kind of on a small scale. also, 30th street station in philly is not really comparable to grand station. but they still had like 30-35 people participating. mostly older women, nice folks. at 530 everyone stopped mid-motion for five minutes, and at the strike of 535 they all started chanting "stop funding war". it was kind of funny; there were about five cops in the big room we were in and only one of them noticed the freeze, and he only went and talked to this guy filming and had him stop. once the chant started, they garnered more attention (and a little applause from the uninvolved) and a "move along now" from the cops. no real conflict, i imagine the officers didn't mind having something to do for a couple minutes and talk about for a while. beats dealing with the recent rash of random subway platform assaults by groups of teens anyway.
today i read over sixty pages of case law on affirmative action in education. the interesting thing when dealing with a few cases on the topic decided by courts of slowly changing makeup is the predictability of the results and arguments advanced. onerous as it is to feel the repetitious nature of similar cases, it gives a really definite impression of how the jurisprudence develops and applies even within the SCOTUS world of arcane distinctions and pick-and-choose stare decisis. so if you have any questions about the university of michigan's admission schemes for undergrad and law school, let me know. cases on such contentious subjects also produce markedly fractured opinions, so i get to read a majority or a plurality, and then a couple concurrences, and a dissent or two. the real development of the day is that i actually almost agreed with thomas, the bane of my con law reading. that guy has to write separately for absolutely every damn case. i would have to do some serious digging to find a majority opinion by him that wasn't a unanimous ruling. anyway, he actually took the majority to serious task for once instead of just going on and on about the intent of the framers. good change for me, i'm sure no one else cares.
the damn wings are fucking up right now. the nhl playoffs are the most arduous of any sport i know of, and have provided me with compelling entertainment, but sometimes it is just too much. theoretically, a team could play as many games in the playoffs as it does in an entire third of the regular season. pretty wild. anyway, i hope they get it together. the idea is to play closer to a sixth of a season in the playoffs than a third. at least the tigers are starting to get their shit together.
what else... watched rain man for the first time the other night. i did not regret it. somewhat unbelievable, but hey, it is a movie after all. tom cruise is such an asshole. dustin hoffman really did do a bang-up job in that; he wasn't in charge of the plot flaws. not a bad flick for a night in, i was staying home to save money for the flea market. money money money. never stops.
i got a call from a friend today letting me know his son was born the other night. good to hear from him, and i'm glad for him and his wife, but man, that is way more money than i care to think about. my buddy is currently taking the bus to his job, two hours each way. the grass might not always be greener on the other side of the fence after all, but it is at least different. no one wins; we all have our own shit to deal with. right now my shit involves going to bed, i guess.

rule against perpetuities

2008-04-08T18:02:00.000-07:00

a word as questionable as "perpetuities" is typically indicative of something bound to be a pain in the ass. suggestions from the prof and the text that this is indeed the case pretty much seals the deal. however, the difficulty was really overstated. yes, it is dense and antiquated, but it is really more of a bullshit hassle than it is impenetrable. the real annoyance is the dozen-odd categories of interests. fee simple subject to open. vested remainder. possibility of reverter. and so on. the only good part about all that is the prof teaches in reference to what he calls the plane of time. makes sense, but he talks about people getting pushed off of the plane of time, and that cracks me up. the notion of snakes on a plane of time really got me going. coming this summer, starring my property prof and samuel l. jackson.
another humorous moment from class: a different prof has recently had occasion to refer to wanton negligence, a specific legal concept. but he pronounces it like wonton. wonton negligence, something we should all do our best to avoid. my friend was walking out of the room for something when he said it, and while she was gone i leaned over and typed "wonton negligence" in her notes. she came back and caused a minor disruption. it was pretty funny. but don't worry, law school still sucks ass and i still hate it. we laugh because it hurts.
over the weekend i finally made it to the famed italian market for the first time. more properly, it should be called the multi-ethnic market; the only italian thing about it was the names of all the butcher shops. saw some pretty crazy shit hanging in those windows, such as a score of whole skinned rabbits. lots of odd fish chunks. suspicious sausages. it was fun to walk around, and they have a lot of things for very cheap. like seriously cheap. we stopped into dibruno bros. because it was there, and damn if i didn't have some of the best cheese ever. one was this estate cheddar where every ingredient was from some big old-school pastoral farm in rural england. the other was a stilton that couldn't be called a stilton because of some law saying a cheese cannot be called stilton if made with raw milk. so it was called stichelton or something, which is supposedly a more accurate historical moniker. in any event, that one was out of this world. it owned my palate for like twenty minutes after a meager bite, so delicious and lingering. pretty damn bold. i didn't pick up anything due to sheer sticker shock. granted, the shit was amazing, but i cannot as yet handle paying for cheese somewhere in the over thirty dollars a pound range. hopefully someday. but damn if it isn't worth every penny.
other recent experiences have featured my preferred dive. i had a notion to make it in there at some point on friday, but at nearly one a.m. i still hadn't made it down there. no matter, we still went and made the most of it, probably more than was necessary. i've never envied anyone whose job it was to get people out of a bar at close, but apparently no one at this bar has that job. no one even asked us to leave. we still had plenty of beer since we got served somewhere near the vicinity of closing. didn't make it out until three or so, but no one seemed put out about it. excellent. last night was my first realization of a special i believed to be apocryphal. the legendary ten dollars for all you can eat wings and all you can drink beer for two hours. bargains galore. made the most of that too, although i almost wish i hadn't. didn't overdo the wings because i didn't get any until i had kicked back a few foamy pints. i couldn't pass up a deal like this. it wouldn't be true to my heritage. all in all, a good time. that bar has been nothing but good to me since i showed up, and i remain appreciative.
shit, have i mentioned i can see again? i have new glasses and they are excellent. to the casual observer, they are not a notable departure from my previous pair. that is alright by me, because i liked those just fine. but there are differences, and i feel these are more structurally sound, and that is certainly a good thing. the first day i had them, i was almost content to do almost nothing but look around and be able to recognize things again. don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, ya know.
i have continued to listen to music i haven't heard or have written off previously, but have switched from the stack of records to stuff on the archive. i won't bore you with all the details, but i was not grossly mistaken about the vast majority of bands i had written off. the one i was the most sure about not liking was the one i actually liked the best. i hadn't heard all that much of their stuff before, but i still think they have one of the dumbest names for a band i have ever heard: perpetual groove. that is almost as bad as improvised freedom. but they're pretty good, leaning to the typical livetronica of most current "jam bands" but with a definite steely dan influence, which adds a nice adjustment. what i've been enjoying the most, though, was an extra download i made of the front guy solo acoustic. i have been doing a lot of that kind of stuff recently, digging on the jeff tweedy solo, trevor from tea leaf, and now this. i don't know if that means i'm getting old or turning into a pansy or what, but i like that stripped down sound sometimes. from metal to solo acoustic in six years.

so i smacked him in the face and downed another carling

2008-04-03T16:51:00.000-07:00

it isn't quite the same thing as the real deal (although i doubt it could be that different), but black label is becoming my new cheap beer. maybe. i don't know. pbr holds a place in my heart, always has, always will. but black label ain't bad and the price is certainly reasonable. also, i get to haul 24 cans around instead of 30 at a time. doesn't seem like it should make that much of a difference, but hey, you walk a few blocks with a thirty pack and see how it goes. i guess we've all probably carried roughly that amount at some point though. well, whatever, hooray black label. way to be cheap.
the only better deal i got this week was on this stack of records sitting next to me. you guessed it, they were free. i know a few people with too many records. this bunch looks pretty decent, and he didn't make me take all he wanted to get rid of, so i had some choice. i mostly have things i've heard of or have heard before, with a couple other things thrown in for fun, just because they looked interesting. i forget the whole story about this vinyl, but i remember that my friend somehow obtained roughly a pickup bed's worth of assorted stuff from some dude a couple years ago. mostly dead-related. no dead records in my part of the haul, of course; that isn't the sort of thing people give away. several records, however, on which members of the dead play. also, keith and donna's album that came out when round records was still going. has a picture of their baby on the front, and it is one of the most unhappy looking babies i have seen who is not crying. i am curious to hear it and all the other stuff; i only have one record i've actually ever listened to before that i don't have a copy of (csny 4-way street; glad i never bothered to pay for it now). since i have been listening to tea leaf green almost exclusively for like two weeks (have i mentioned they're really good? yeah? good.), i think i might switch things up and spend tonight listening to this stack, probably 15-20 albums in there. i'm not doing a whole lot else... carling and free records it is. come along for the ride; i'm sure you want to read what i think about a bunch of old albums someone was willing to part with for no compensation. features include a very questionable-looking roger mcguinn solo record and an inherently suspicious ray manzarek album. can you tell i'm bored?
starting out with a david bromberg record called wanted dead or alive. i had heard of the dude, but i don't remember what i had even heard. this is one of those record that has like four people from the dead playing on a bunch of it. i grabbed like three bromberg albums in the bunch, so hopefully it turns out alright. if not, shit, i didn't pay for it. so far, it is alright. music is good, but the dude has a weird voice. hard to describe. first song was kind of bouncy an upbeat, but this next one is straight up blues and the voice is a lot better when he isn't so much trying to sing. the blues requires more in the way of highly emotive speaking than singing in my opinion. either way, the cover combined with the words to the first few tracks reveals a distinct humor element. i can appreciate it when it is done like this - where the music is no joke but some words are kinda silly. this is why zappa and primus kick ass but tenacious d can kiss my ass. i am supportive of music having an element of comedy, but not so much the other way around. just not my thing, with the possible exception of dennis leary's "i'm an asshole". anyway, i just managed to look up bromberg's wikipedia, and it turns out he's from philly. far out. currently living in delaware, something we can all aspire to. decent guitar playing in my book (jerry plays on most of the record, but he is so easy to pick out i know who is playing what), style is seriously eclectic. translation: this is a record i enjoy listening to, but will not often be the right record at the right time. nothing better than when that works out. but overall i like it, and i'm glad it isn't terrible, cause i have like three of the dude's albums now. lots of instruments on most tracks, really well arranged. one of the records is live and i'm curious how many people play on that. right now the arrangements on these blues tracks remind me of goodnight ladies on transformer. nice minimalist reading of statesboro blues on here with a bunch of other shit worked in. crazy version of kansas city, very big band yet still bluesy. this is a record i will put on again sometime.
time for this ray manzarek business. i heard a different solo album of his while my friend was giving me all of these records, and it was totally over the top. operatic vocals, very proto-electronica at the time. this one so far sounds like he just wanted to keep playing the music the doors did, but he gets to be jim. oh, and not be in a band with jim. the opener is like some sort of a rock and roll samba. some cool percussion. i guess i can kind of dig it. i thought this one would be equally ridiculous given the album art and the fact that it is called 'the golden scarab'. and yes, all visible skin on mr. manzarek is painted gold on the cover. as things progress, it is definitely extremely doors-esque but doesn't sound like anything they would have actually played. or maybe it just seems like that because jim was so distinctive in writing and voice combined with a little synthesizer technology development. i think the song that is playing now actually was a really old doors song that never made it to record for them.
as mentioned, these record reviews are brought to you by carling black label beer. confusing thing about this beer: carling is like the budweiser of britain, so that is the immediate association. in two places on this can, it says "carling canada" and has a big maple leaf. however, lower on the can, it says product of the u.s.a.. strange, but cheap. i like that. it should be up there in use with strange, but true. gotta find a way to work it in a little more.
the manzarek record has quickly degenerated into mediocre cheese. if the music and songwriting were better, okay, if things got way cheesier, okay, but this is just lukewarm and uninteresting. enough of that shit. i'm not going to throw the record out, but i'm not gonna put it on again real soon i do not think.
time to check out this keith and donna record. too much donna from the get go, i wish she would just take it easy. she's touring with the zen tricksters these days. if they played close, i might go. the bass is really good, i wonder who is playing. john kahn; i should have guessed. looks like he only plays on this track though, that is too bad. shit, this reminds me some guy gave me a jerry band disc today. i should play that later too. we'll get there. i have a feeling that this whole record is gonna be a little too much donna. keith sure as shit shouldn't sing. his piano is hardly even audible thus far, which is too bad because he could still play pretty damn well in 75 when this came out. things are getting a little better on the album, sounds like apocryphal janice joplin with way better keyboard work. the baby on the sleeve is named zion. seriously, who the hell names their kid zion? who does that?
time for another carling black label ad. this beer is brewed by g. heileman brewery, who you may know from such hits as old style. they are one of the milwaukee breweries that got by alright and managed to swallow up other regional brand naming rights.
hah! i was about to give keith a bunch of credit and suggest that he should have played more organ instead of piano all the damn time. turns out it was merl saunders on the organ for that track. i guess he should have played more organ in the dead too, only problem is he wasn't ever in the band. for all the praise heads heap on the 70s, i think the band would have been way better, and admittedly way different, if merl was in the hot seat for a spell. that isn't a job you can really recommend to anyone though. i hope bruce hornsby and tom constanten say a prayer of thanks and supplication every day of their lives. the curse is so strong that it killed off the keys dude from dark star orchestra.
surprisingly, the album itself is pretty much exactly what i expected. nothing blows me away, but it is all pretty decent music. i was hoping for a little more cheese on this record, a la keith's "let me sing your blues away" off wake of the flood. working in a little sax now, but nothing as outrageous as that track. most of the songs are things the dead could conceivably have played with the godchauxs in the band, but ones i'm glad they never did. just filler. nothing bad, but nothing good either.
gonna give this roger mcguinn thing a go. looks like he mostly plays other peoples' music on this one, but the guitar and vocals are absolutely unmistakable. something to be said for that. the man does what he does. makes me interested in hearing the one byrds album i picked up, the notorious byrds brothers. we'll see about that sometime.
man, all these records i was skeptical about but willing to give a shot make me look forward to the flea market in the park across the street. next weekend, i believe, is the first one of the year. can't wait. wish i had a little more money to throw around, but i'm sure i'll make a good pickup or two.
man, mcguinn can do dylan like few can. i've heard a ton of people do knockin on heaven's door, but this is somehow just so right. i feel like zimmy would put some kind of stamp of approval on this. bitchin pedal steel, and someone is playing perfect rhythm section piano. and god, that guitar. any time you have someone with an immediately distinctive tone, you are probably dealing with a worthwhile guitarist.
the following announcement has been paid for by carling black label beer: my cats are super fuckin pretty and little.
whoa, the music just took a turn for the soulful. works out alright. rocking, but a nonstop gentle country caress from mcguinn's guitar, all the while approaching a genre not immediately congruous with what normally goes on for the man. the result is very late beatles; something that could have made it onto let it be (it isn't like that record couldn't use a little help here and there). now things are just straight folksy byrds style. i didn't need more of this, if i wanted the byrds i would probably put on one of the umpteen (not marked) byrds albums i already have. some silly string arrangement on this, and it is just unnecessary and overdone. someone probably told mcguinn that, and whoever it was probably got fired. the album cover has roger leaning on a wall of recording equipment, looking very pleased with himself/coked out, and the lettering is that definite 70s conception of the future style. at least the guy can play and sing, even if his writing is hit or miss. well, i guess he didn't write a bunch of this, so i have to critique is song selection, and whatever just played was a poor choice.
now he is actually showing a little maturation in his guitar playing. i love how the guy plays, but it is always kind of the same stuff more or less. this track features his neil young guitar (thankfully not vocal) impersonation, and it sounds great. stuff neil himself could be proud of. i was discussing neil young with a buddy today, and damn if the dude isn't one of the all-time greats. makes me want to throw some on, but i'm gonna play at least one more new record before that i think. might actually play the second record of four way street, they do a pretty psychedelic southern man, and i wonder what cowgirl in the sand sounds like; it is actually kind of short compared to the version i am most familiar with.
alright, one more new record i'm gonna talk about for tonight. gonna make it the brewer and shipley album with one toke over the line on it, see if they have anything else to offer as a pretty typical folk duo at the height of psychedlic scene exploitation. these dudes look ridiculous. but i do love one toke over the line, and it sounds fabulous on vinyl. the guy i got it from didn't know they did this song, but i did tell him. he seemed a little regretful, so i offered to give this one back, but he let me keep it. we'll see if it is worthwhile. one toke is the lead track with good reason. what is not to like? my old mp3 of the song is off the fear and loathing soundtrack, and the beginning is the monologue listing all of the drugs in the case, and wasn't a bad addition at all. the rest of the tracks proceed apace; the whole thing is like simon and garfunkel for people who were too cool for simon and garfunkel. or maybe people who had taken a vow to not listen to simon and garfunkel for like ten years. this album is as good as any other album i've bought for just one song i knew and loved.
but that's enough for now. if you didn't really read anything that's cool. i'm mostly just amusing myself as best i can. lots of things i should do, but nothing i want to do. this was a fine alternative. listened to some decent tunes, but probably nothing i'm going to push on anybody. i'll probably wind up playing more tlg before i go to bed. just can't shake that addiction. they're playing here again, during my exam period. i think i will probably go anyway.

blinded

2008-04-01T20:16:00.000-07:00

but not by the light. or anything poetic at all. no, i broke my glasses. on sunday. i am rapidly losing patience with not being able to see a damn thing. it is not easy to work on a computer or read fine print all day like this. i did, however, get what i considered a good deal at this place. it was more engaging than i thought a place for optical needs could really be. they were all helpful and the selection was outrageous. a lot of things i thought i wanted (octagonal frames anyone?) that made me look even stranger than i actually am. in any case, i look forward (oops. inadvertent pun.) to getting new glasses.
fortunately, i am at a point where i don't use them for reading textbooks half the time anyway. managed to handle a good bit of property law this evening. i always thought i was interested in the history of the law and how it had developed, but after reading thirty dense pages about transfer of property over time under feudalism., i have been forced to reconsider. the best part was, after you learned something, it turned out that law no longer applied anywhere except like maine and new hampshire. over and over. actually, it usually applied nowhere anymore. my main takeaway lesson here is some ridiculous terminology to throw around. fee simple absolute is a big one. i wonder if absolut vodka has ever incorporated that in one of their many witty advertisements. doubtful. they prefer to really stretch the concept. i would also like to know how long this has been their campaign, but i can't expect all you grey goose drinkin' types to keep track.
i have more or less made it through the winter with almost no liquor, mostly because i don't prefer it and because it is such a hassle to get. and also a waste of money. liquor never seems to last as long as it theoretically should. whatever, it is not something i missed too much. and now the weather is turning nice and i do love seasonal beer in the spring and summer. drank a beer on a porch today, perfect weather for it. even opened a window when i got home, and the cats are really excited about that. i'm excited about that because fresh air over forty eight or so degrees has been a long time coming. but i am still more excited about the prospect of restored vision.

bored bored bored (even with abortion)

2008-03-26T18:15:00.000-07:00

today was no good. no good at all. wednesdays feature my two most boring classes, civ pro and property. both have recently featured, in addition to mind-numbing content, lengthy "discussions" where people give their store-bought opinions with poor articulation. i have plenty of things to be doing, but nothing i feel like doing. or rather, of those things i should be doing, none appeal to me. so it is things i shouldn't be doing instead, like re-reading old achewood strips and adding to my collection of empty forties. as a master of justification, i blame today.
in addition to my classes, today featured me stepping on my pants and adding to a growing rip on three separate occasions. the tear now goes up past the back of my knee, aka these jeans are no longer viable. i mean, i know they can theoretically be repaired or whatever, but that seems unlikely. i do have a different pair, fortunately. still, i can't help but wish i was just back home, with a job, a car, and a meijer. problem fucking solved were that the case. hell, i could also pick up a thirty pack of pbr for like thirteen bucks while i was at meijer. and anything else i might need. i miss meijer, and owning it.
this week has also turned out to be a giant abortion party (i'm naming my next metal band abortion party). con law has gotten to that wonderful time where we get to cover roe and casey and a few others. i've been reading it all week, but tomorrow is when we'll get there in class. i am dreading the potential airing of opinions in class, but the prof is not so much the type for too much of that. i think he will have a lot of really well-reasoned and thoughtful things to say about the jurisprudence itself, and deal with pre-existing opinions in the context of analyzing how certain justices come out in each opinion. these opinions are ridiculously long, most have a leading opinions and then a pair of concurrences, maybe a concur in part and dissent in part, and then two or three dissents. it kind of makes me angry. the good news is, if taught properly, this is an excellent point for demonstrating how the feelings of individual justices always necessarily invade decision making. a simple thought experiment considering the current makeup of the court is enough to see that a decision made now would contain all the same methodologies and accusations from opposing sides, with the utilized claims trading places.
but classroom discussion of abortion just wasn't enough bullshit for me to handle on its own, so i ordered up a double and went to a talk during lunch today. it was billed as a national lawyers guild event, but afterwards i recalled that many law schools have groups dedicated to reproductive rights, but mine doesn't, so the guild just kind of incorporated that concern. fine by me; i imagine the overlap between the two is pretty significant. i feel like i should fit in there. after today, i don't know. it is always disconcerting to show up for something wanting to agree with whatever it is and being unable to do so based on the presentation. that's how i felt when i went to that cop watch thing at lava the other month, and today left me with a similar taste. the speaker was a lobbyist for planned parenthood, and the supposed topic was the status of reproductive rights in PA and the stances of this state's representatives at the state and federal levels. it was a little more comprehensive than that.
in fact, it was just the other side of the coin from all the anti-abortion types. same bullshit, different orientation. a lot like democrat/republican. both sides are full of shit and use the same tactics they decry when the opposition makes use of them. this was painfully obvious when the speaker talked about winning the language war and used pejorative terms to describe the other side in the same way they like to call themselves pro-life. and as lame as all that was, it wasn't as bad as it got, and i could understand where they were coming from. what i found absolutely unforgivable was what i found to be abhorrent gender politics and stale second-wave feminism. initially, i just snickered that all the handouts were pink, the prominently displayed photos of demonstrations with all (white) women in pink shirts saying "this is what a feminist looks like" and placards promoting roe v. wade, which was superseded by casey v. planned parenthood (of SE PA no less) more than fifteen years ago. then the speaker made some offhand derogatory comments about men, and i got to be a little more annoyed. if men are so bad, why do you work for/support an organization that has no purpose but for women fucking men? if they're so bad, don't sleep with them. she spoke as if men's only purpose was to irresponsibly impregnate women (portrayed as powerless without the aid of such organizations as PP). i was waiting for her to suggest that the men in the room had only showed up for free pizza. but what really sealed the deal for me was when the speaker pointed out all the things planned parenthood had given her to hand out. like i said, it was bad enough that everything was pink, but then she pointed out the condoms they were giving away. far from ordinary condoms, these were "designer" condoms. the speaker said "women like designer clothes, designer shoes, so we're giving them designer condoms called 'dress required for entry'... entry into you!". i hardly even know where to begin with that. suffice to say that i found the assumptions about gender troubling to say the least. i won't bore you with the laundry list of inconsistencies, but i will say that the organization fails itself as much as their opposition hurts it. i would like to do PR work for them. i am glad they exist, and i think they do things no one else does but are needed, but god, please bring yourselves into the twenty first century and at least try and contextualize the battle you're trying to fight. the speaker actually suggested that the "anti-choicers" got together and schemed up a plan to fight a war against women on all fronts, dedicated only to controlling womens' lives. uh, if these people got together, it was probably at a place called church, and if they're beating you on a lot of fronts, it is probably because religious conviction, for good or ill, prompts people to stronger feelings and more effort than a mere scientific opinion. also, if someone is militantly "pro-life", they're probably not just committed to running womens' lives, but their ideology probably prescribes lifestyles for all people.
also, the speaker claimed the best and most effective way to promote reproductive rights is to argue with people at the bar. i am smart enough to know that i know very little, but i do know that arguing with people at the bar is one of the biggest wastes of time available to the american public. in my experience, people rarely change deeply held opinions, regardless if they discuss those issues with a close friend or a perfect stranger. arguing with people at bars does not qualify as a grassroots movement in my book.
the truth, as it were, of the matter, is that both sides spend a lot of time arguing about when life starts and what to call a person, but i don't think the metaphorical jury has come back with a verdict for the definition of either life or personhood. we can't know when life begins if we don't know what life is, and we can't agree on what to call a bunch of cells that is not yet what intuitively counts as a person. even if some state passes a referendum saying life begins at conception, it rings hollow if we can't say what life is. and i don't think we can. people are willing to say plants are alive, but few shed tears at the demise of a carrot.
listen to me going on and on about this bullshit. it is just one of those things that is not going to go away anytime soon, but will not possibly matter in the long run. "i don't think we're meant to know that". it all brings me back to stranger in a strange land, which i wrapped up again the other day. grokking (FUCK YEAH NOT MARKED BY SPELL CHECK!!!!!!!) is a great and certainly novel (no pun intended) concept that i find really helpful for a lot of things. i could write a damn dissertation about grokking and the heideggarian project. it actually fills in an important part of the deconstructive analysis. one of my profs used to always except babies and angels from certain things. another one has gone on a huge animal rights kick, but i think the idea of life defined by the concept of grokking really rounds out his analysis from where it is now. actually, that is just what i think; i haven't read much of his current stuff. but i did read the dude's dissertation, which is saying something. those don't get read a whole lot, but it was so close to what he actually got to teach me that it was worth my while.
wow, my computer just told me it was going to give up on automatically checking for software updates. i think that means i've owned it for two years. flew right by. the computer has treated me well over that period of time, regardless of how the rest of my life has gone. i can't believe it has been that long. time flies whether you're having fun or not, i guess. my bell's sticker has completely come off, so i guess i've had it a while. i remember using this puppy to sign up for the lsats and turn in my applications... at the the bar proper. they always knew it was serious when i walked in with the computer. got me a drink or two. more than one can ask out of the average computer. i might have paid a chunk of change for it back then, but i don't feel like it is incapable of handling anything i throw at it. more than i could say for my last desktop two years after i got it.
i got carded for the first time in forever this evening. across the street, no less, where i go all too frequently. two new people at the counter though, and the dude who asked me for id looked like he was younger than me. the funniest part is that he accepted my id and made no note of the fact that it is expired. add that to the long list of things i should be taking care of. i don't get carded a whole lot at least, and i probably could have found someone there to vouch for me anyway. still. it was pretty funny. i can understand though, dude probably just got the job, making sure he doesn't fuck anything up. they've got these weird forms you can fill out here though, like an affidavit almost, where you assert that you represented you were of legal age to a place. hopefully this is nothing i will have to deal with anyway.
today i was shocked that a good friend of mind was unfamiliar with the wiktionary. everyone knows about wikipedia, so i don't understand what the stretch is. on the other hand, i can't recall with certainty when or how i discovered the wiktionary. fascinating commentary on linguistics, but i am sure it is already better documented than my study on spell check and language. superior in selection to urban dictionary, but not superseding. still plenty of things to like about urban dictionary, but better etymology with wiktionary. depends what you want to find, i guess. like everything else.

CAN'T STAND IT

2008-03-25T16:46:00.000-07:00

the transition back to reality has been harsh, as predicted. i also wrote a long email to a cousin to answer the question of why i went to law school, which really gave me an opportunity to answer that question full-on. complex and not uplifting. i'm sure it is redeemable somehow. specifics to be named later. i can't believe it is only tuesday. the good news from the law school front is that this guy is telling it how it is. sad but true. i really feel like he gives a voice to the way i feel about some things. this article is where he really gets to be spot on. it is almost like the shit i complain about on this blog was drained of inebriation and the passion of the moment articulated in an acceptable format. such is the irony of cls, always articulated through the proper channels. but just about anything can be criticized as not radical enough in some aspect or another, and hence bound to be co-opted by the proverbial man. i guess cls has been more or less effectively put down, mostly through mischaracterization of some of its tenets. also, reputable or not, it was pretty well known, and i decided i was way off when i said that my philosophy of law prof was unfamiliar. no, he hadn't heard of this other shit i busted out, which i also learned about through debate. pierre schlag on normativity. given the dude's name and theory, i always assumed he was just some leftist intellectual in france, but he is actually a con law prof at colorado. i really want to go back and give that stuff a look again, i may or may not still have some on an sdi cd in my case.
i met a guy who went to colorado law today. well, i've known him sort of for a while. he is in my "elective" and talks a lot. at first this annoyed me, but i reflected that i could actually be this guy. he happens to be in a wheelchair, and if i was, i think i would be more scholarly. he did two years at boulder and then got paralyzed from the waist down. four years later, he's starting over at temple. dude has a pretty decent story. and he is much better to actually have a conversation with than listen to in class. but that goes for just about anyone i go to school with.
i am listening to hunky dory. this led to my discovery that the lyric in changes is "strange fascinations fascinating me". i could never understand that one; we were talking about it at school today. for a while, it sounded to me like strange fascination with el bulli, which would be anachronistic in addition to bizarre, but that is what i heard. as if i haven't changed enough lyrics on that album (wine may change me...). i also gave a closer listen to "kooks". almost leaves me embarrassed for bowie somehow. on the one hand it is kind of poignant, but on the other hand it is sort of too personal for the record. i do like the bit about him not being very good at beating up other people's dads though.
the cats are being silly, per usual. runnin around and rasslin. jack's favorite toy right now is a piece of paper. i wave it at him while he shreds it up, and when i get tired of it and drop it he sits on it squarely. straw does not like the noise shaken paper makes, so he hides and watches from the hallway. i think they might even be prettier and littler than they were yesterday, no matter what science or metaphysics might say. it is like they are rapidly approaching zero on an exponential curve where prettiness and littleness (both unmarked by spell check) are absolute at the value of zero. they get littler and prettier every day, seeming to be tangential with the axis and yet somehow not there, as they demonstrate constantly. those rascals. or, the epithet preferred at logan: "raucous beasts".
i have not been sleeping all that well. for the past couple of nights i have had strange and terrifying super lucid dreams within dreams. i will "wake up" and see all sorts of bizarre things in my room and then slam back into sleep. i can think of no logical explanation for why this is happening. on the one hand, it is really really interesting, but it leaves me pretty tired at school and has thus perpetuated my diet coke habit. i actually had a discussion with the guy who runs the truck i always get it at. he said coca cola had raised the price per case at the distributor; it is now something like twenty bucks for a case of twenty ouncers (not a word according to spell check). i told him i wouldn't settle for diet pepsi, and he said that everyone he had asked had said the same thing. he drinks the full flavor, and has similar feelings. very keen on the fact that it was taste loyalty and not brand loyalty.
speaking of full flavor and taste loyalty, camel CHANGED MY FUCKING SMOKES. the takeover is not yet complete, and i may buy a carton or two someplace. changing the packaging is annoying enough, but changing the blend is unforgivable. i should have seen it coming, i guess. they've already done it to filters and lights. pack and blend at the same time. some asshole in marketing thought it would be a good idea to call it "the classic -- remastered". fuck that person. did they not see what happened with george lucas? did they miss that episode of south park? have they never heard the story of "new coke"? i understand that camel relies on hooking young people to smoke, but why change things for people you've already secured in the fold? you got all the new ones with the stupid ass signature blends. there is no need to alienate the committed. simply bad business. i am considering drafting a letter. something along the lines of the one to spartan foods about the eight ingredients required for the recipe suggestion on the side of a box of mac and cheese. but the point here is even stronger. i feel like vincent vega talking about a car getting keyed. you do not change a man's cigarettes. i'm switching to red apples.

extra sour cream

2008-03-23T18:17:00.000-07:00

i know i said that a bunch last night, but i'm not entirely sure why. well, the fact that it was an excellent party where many beers were consumed explains some, but not all. the party was an appropriate culmination of a somewhat extended birthday celebration featuring none other than mando b nasty. get outta here, boston! he called me on friday afternoon while i was journeying to the vet for cat food, and by the time i made it home, went to the bar with law school folks for a while, cleared up some minor directional points and walked to the distributor to provide for a night of revelry, he was here. worked out pretty great. he was on his way back from hiking near the virginia/west virginia border. apparently he canoed that stretch when he did the whole a.t. the other year and went back to walk so no one can accuse him of cheating. glad he stopped in on his way back.
after he got here and we had some beers, i realized i hadn't eaten anything since the sandwich mentioned in the previous post. coming from the train, mando was pretty hungry too, and offered to cook up some goodness. he set up his stove (modified beer can burning denatured alcohol) on my kitchen floor and got to business. we generously fed three hungry men with the following all mixed together: one pouch each of roasted garlic and southwestern mashed potatoes, a bunch of jack, some cheddar, green peppers, some other spicy pepper, a packet of tuna, and a few leftover pepperonis. it was both excellent and delicious or, if you prefer, "heady scrump".
on saturday we mostly just walked around philly for quite a while. we met up for a while with mando's sister, who is actually doing a semester at temple. we went to the bell with her and a friend of hers. everyone was really disappointed at the size of the bell, and i think chuck said the same thing when he was here. its tough to reach back and think about what i thought at first, but i don't remember being disappointed with its size. i think i probably imagined it bigger, but the first time i went was really an experience. the security was a lot tighter and i went through the building slowly and read a bunch about the bell before i saw it. mostly it was just made real for me, regardless of size.
our route took us pretty much in a loop from my place into town along south street, and then up through old city. we went back on the boulevard so he could run up the art museum stairs. lots of great pics resulted, and hopefully they will make it to his facebook at some time. lots of tomfoolery around the game pieces in front of whatever that municipal building is. also many good shots involving statutes, from shoe-shining to tit-grabbing to high-fiving. the high five one is probably my favorite, i look forward to seeing it again.
we managed to get mando a cheesesteak, and between that and seeing his sister, his only philly objectives were pretty much accomplished. this left us free for what was truly an ideal party. four or so bands played, lots of beer both good and bad, and a broad mix of people. i thought i would know most people from the neighborhood, but there were people from all over. one of the bands was from las vegas and somehow also portland oregon. they've been telling everyone they're from portland maine while they're on the east coast because they think being from portland oregon invites stereotyping. i don't know how often geographic location is an accurate description of sound, but whatever. they are touring in a chevy cobalt with four people and all their gear, which really impressed me. they insist that it really isn't too cramped. i'm glad i'm not doing it.
mando brough his ukulele along to the party, and although it was selected for trail use because it is so lightweight, it was certainly a hit. a party with bands usually has an abnormally high proportion of musicians, and this was no exception, so a lot of people took turns playing around with the thing. mando played it with one of the bands for a while too, but that band already had quite a collection of instruments going. i am not even sure how many people were playing or who was officially in the band, but there were like eight instruments going at some points. actually sounded pretty cool.
i thought there would be a lot of leftover beer because the party was big but not huge, and people kept bringing more. but we partied until it was all gone, even the hidden stash sierra nevada case that disappeared five minutes after being unveiled to the party at large. i still had a deuce from the foodery, the place i got that sandwich at. bear republic hop rod rye. oh hell yeah. it was so good. like a bigger, less-sweet red's rye. the rye still managed to come through pretty well, but it was all about the hops. would have been nice to be able to use a glass and get the full aroma, but the party necessitated small sacrifice. the nice thing was that walking around a party with it (not leaving it with the general stash) for a while and then drink it slowly allowed some temperature variation. extremes of frontloaded and aftertaste with a nice spectrum between. when really hoppy beers are served really cold, the bitterness abates a little and the armoa jumps up and gets you and the floral and fruity character of the hops dominates. after it warms up, its all just bitterness, but with more flavor. enough about that. this lecture from the man who brought that deuce and about twelve carling black labels to this party.
so yeah, we had a blast. but my weekend was far from over, as this afternoon was lamb-o-rama '08 at my sister's place. a lot of great food, and a whole lot of lamb, which was excellent. yet another good time, almost more than i could handle. but i made it. i wanted to bring a bottle of wine but state run stores were all closed for easter, and that is the only way to get a bottle of wine here. so i brought cheese instead, which was well -received along with the rest of an excellent cheese plate that i did not bring. i went with some sheep's milk gouda, can't remember who made it. but it was smooth and rich but not assertive or overpowering. the plate included an excellent manchego, some suitably sharp cheddar, a funky blue, and some strange ricotta thing. but it was all about the lamb. i am still totally full almost eight hours later. given this most excellent birthday celebration -> (this symbol is the best way i can think of to describe the relationship of the transition/interweaving of the two) weekend, it will be a harsh transition back to the everyday tomorrow morning. thanks again to all the well-wishers who noted my quarter-century anniversary.
p.s. i recently remembered to check the google ads at the bottom of the page on this blog. pretty funny stuff sometimes.

i just ate a big ole sandwich

2008-03-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

it is true. i did. and it was awesome. in my neighborhood, there are many stickers with this phrase and a picture on them. the picture looks like a man who has indeed just eaten a big ol sandwich. my sandwich had smoked turkey, smoked bacon, jack cheese, onion, tomato, delightfully spicy chipotle mayo on grilled sourdough. i enjoyed this with a deuce of green flash imperial ipa. truly a most excellent lunch, fit for a birthday. i still had to go back to class, which is where i am now. i have a bear republic hop rod rye decue in my bag, and i would really like to be drinking it in this class. and smoking a cigarette. be all like, hey, i can smoke, its my birthday. i'm old enough that it means nothing to me now, so it might as well be an excuse for something. right now all it means is that my license is expired. fuck you, twenty five.
last night was pretty cool; i really liked the bar. dark walls with cool shit painted on 'em. one of those places that has dollar bills stuck on the ceiling and shit. the whole bar reminded me of a really really cool basement of a modestly sized house. i was there a lot later than i planned but it was a good time. the music was excellent. i've never seen a deejay at a bar, because back home those bars were the sort that i vigorously avoided. but this was pretty excellent. it was actually at a place i knew, i just didn't know i knew it. i had been past many times, but never in. it was most things i wanted out of a bar. the music was excellent and i had plenty of fun.
"an alien may be sued in any district" is what i just read in the statute we are talking about. i should probably get back to that.

record scratch noises

2008-03-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

tonight i am going to this guy's show. partly because he is a friend of mine, partly because it is at someplace i have never been, but mostly because i actually think he's really good. i never really gave a whole lot of thought to deejays and what they do mostly because i have little to no interest in dancing. and most remixes i heard tended to annoy me. but it is possible to do some pretty cool stuff, apparently. lots of people i have met here are deejays of varying skill and experience. i have not gone to a party without someone spinning for most of the time since i got here, i don't think. it definitely changes what kind of records people buy, but what fascinates me is how many different directions it can go in. on the other hand, there is an awful lot of music out there with a lot of variance, so if you're just manipulating music, the palate starts out pretty diverse. in my opinion, when it is done well, there is no reason to disparage deejays the way some people do. looking at things honestly, all music draws heavily on what came before in the natural way of things. well, whatever. tonight should be fun: there will be lots of people i know, there is no cover, and drinks are allegedly cheap. i'm trying not to spend much money, but i am bad at being at a place and doing nothing for two minutes, let alone two hours. also, no smoking in bars here, so that leaves me with one less distraction. we'll see how it goes.
in other music news, i just keep getting more and more into tea leaf green, that band i saw way back when i first moved to this apartment. they have a lot of good shit on archive.org and my download speeds at school have been ridiculously fast, so i've built up quite a collection. one appealing thing is the enormous catalogue they draw from. they've been around less than a decade and have already written like 120 songs. pretty prolific, especially for a band that gets lumped in with all the other supposed "jam" acts. also, they occasionally play acoustic shows as coffee bean brown, and that serves as an excellent change of pace for a band whose style includes a generous helping of synthesizer and organ, not to mention effects-laden guitar. so i've been enjoying a bit of that; not difficult to do when everyone is such a great musician and the lead vocalist has one of the best voices in the business. if anyone is curious, i can point you in the right direction for some good recordings. also, wilco fans past and present, there is a torrent for a '97 lounge ax show of jeff tweedy and bob egan that just got upped on etree today. looks pretty promising.
today i went to a talk by the 122nd person exonerated from death row in the united states. harold wilson is his name, and he has a story to tell. it is not a feel-good tale of fun and excitement. it is awesome that dna evidence cleared him, but how he got to where he was in the first place is pretty outraging. the asshole who prosecuted him is best known for a training film for new philly prosecutors where he instructs them to avoid selecting black jurors in death penalty cases. the bloody coat in evidence, which somehow appeared in his mothers basement (mysterious to this day), was much too small. but they never let him try it on at trial. his bloody sneakers? the "blood" turned out to be hot chocolate stains. the parade of bullshit just kind of kept going. the guy became a public speaker because he had something to say, not because he was the best public speaker in the world, but i found him effective. the one thing that gives me pause is that he was speaking as an anti-death penalty advocate, which is great and makes sense. however, the real problem for him was that he was wrongly convicted. this country has killed plenty of people wrongly, i'm sure, but i think most of the people we wrongly convict aren't sentenced to death. the speaker did 17 years, which is a travesty that can never be made right, but what about someone who does 50 without being sentenced to death? who is there for the wrongfully convicted who aren't on death row? being put to death is arguably the worst thing that can happen, but the dehumanizing experience of spending decades institutionalized could be arguably worse. this is why suicide is commonly attempted in prison. so, plenty of great things to think about there.
i accidentally started reading stranger in a strange land again. i honestly didn't mean to. i picked it up the other night when i couldn't sleep and went through the first fifty pages or whatever. there was no turning back. i am always surprised when i re-read a novel at how different the experience is. different things stand out, i feel differently about different characters. fascinating commentary on the interaction between the reader and the text. lots of deleuze and heidegger in there. i wanted to do a phenomenological evaluation of that sort of theory through the lens of the dead and/or phish, where the same was always different, with ascriptions to time and place and other contextual factors. it made great sense to me and i thought i had the makings of a really good paper, but my professor said that someone considering graduate study should not force a prof who would probably be writing a letter of recommendation to tell admissions committees that this student wrote an important senior paper on hippie music. he then credited both bands and mentioned that everyone in phish had a phd in performance for their respective instruments. i told him no, but he was sure. i was right. so instead i wrote a paper on derrida's "force of law", which wound up steering me toward law school. i was still under the delusion that legal eduction included a somewhat academic aspect. anyway, back to undergrad, where i got my phish kick by writing a mythology paper about the gamehendge saga and the feats of hercules. in the spring, i wrote what i still think is the best thing i've ever done by a long shot, a paper on perspectivism in nietszsche. maybe that was the fall... in any event, it was a hell of a lot better than the derrida paper was, and probably would have been sufficient to get me in someplace decent. but write the derrida paper i did, which played an undeniable role in landing me in my current predicament. who knows, i probably would have hated grad school too, but i don't think i could hate it as much as i hate law school. hard to say, really, because it brings us back to the original point that experience is dictated in large part by context while drawing on all prior experience. i think all i really wanted to say was that i am not upset that i am reading a book i love less than six months after i already re-read it because some things are different every time. so i am going to do that for a little while longer and then go to the show.

meat

2008-03-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

ohhhhhhhhh man. that's most of what i have said since lunch today. it was pretty damn fabulous. my sister took me up in honor of my upcoming birthday. the only problem was that i had to go back to school afterwards. we went to fogo de chao, a brazillian steakhouse. the idea is pretty much that you have a coaster type thing with a green side and a red side. if the green side is up, one of the dozens of men walking around with some kind of meat on a sword/skewer will ask you if you want what he has. they hold off if the coaster thing is on the red side. basically, this is the best way ever to eat a ton of good meats, and so i did. lamb chop, pork medallion, top and bottom sirloin, beef ribs, ribeye, filet mignon, bacon-wrapped and regular, also bacon-wrapped chicken, some sort of garlic steak, probably a couple of other things. a serious assortment. surprisingly, i have not napped. more importantly, i did eat a bunch of really good stuff. the experience itself was overall pretty excellent.
also excellent was going back to school and being like, hey, i just ate at fogo de chao and having everyone be like ohhhhhhhh shit. pleasing mix of happy-for-me and jealousy. one of my buddies got so excited that he was basically trying to talk me into going back soon, perhaps this evening. not going to happen, but it would be fun to go again for some otherwise somewhat notable occasion. i might be hungry enough again sometime this summer, or at least some time where i will be rushed to the comfiest bed of all time immediately after i decide i have had enough. while i certainly had plenty of time to enjoy myself today and did indeed do so, it would also be good to have plenty of time to sit around. i'm sure they want people to move along at some point and all that, but another thirty/forty minutes wouldn't have bothered them i don't think. the service was pretty excellent. if your green side is up and you do not have a plateful of meat, someone will come up and ask if they should direct the nearest sword-bearer ("gaucho" they call them, but i'm pretty sure that is more like a south american cowboy) to your table or if they need to find one with a certain type of meat you're waiting for. eager to avoid a possible tragic underserving of meat.
i thought for sure that the still-full stomach combined with reading civ pro would put me out, but not quite. but damn is that shit boring. property is almost is bad, and those are the two i have tomorrow. the current poll was put up during property on monday. i was in class and we were once again doing this really big waste of time thing where assholes i could give a fuck about go on about their opinions. look, i appreciate the attempt to encourage critical discussion of the material in class, but on the other hand, none of these people says anything real profound. mostly trite and annoying. i guess i could chip in my own two cents, but i usually don't have anything revolutionary to say about, say, restrictive covenants. i can give you arguments for both sides on anything, but hopefully anyone can. no need to check if people can do that every time we have class. also, if i did have anything good to say, i don't think anyone would be real interested in hearing it. man, i really fucking hate having class with seventy other people. totally not my style.
anyway, while people were going on about nothin about nothin about oil i started thinking about barn animal noises. brought me way back. cow says moo, sheep says baa (not marked), three singing pigs go la la la. i'm pretty sure "moo" was my first "word". i do not, however, know why i decided it should be a poll. i had a good idea for one, but i promptly forgot it. maybe i can rustle up another decent one at some point. also, look for mountain dew skoal (not marked! wiktionary says it is a toast, kind of like "cheers") at a gas station near you. especially meijer gas stations, since i own that shit.

back in the saddle

2008-03-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

school doesn't seem as bad as it did before the break. it is worse. kicking things off with legal writing just puts things on the wrong foot. the theme of today's class was the aforementioned oral argument, and the point was that the prof was free to adjust grades for the actual brief up or down completely at her discretion based on oral arguments. no one wins or anything, the point is just that she can boost people she likes and drop people she doesn't. reductions are theoretically tied to failure to behave professionally, which is of course not defined. so far all i know is that the syllabus stipulation that "extremely sloppy dress" would result in a markdown has morphed into "suits are mandatory". this is literally what happened. the only other thing specifically noted as unprofessional so far is saying anything about your opponent's brief. because in practice, we all know lawyers would never disparage their opposition. never. and that is what this exercise is all about: preparing us for practice. since we will all undoubtedly write appellate briefs and make oral arguments for them. look, if you want people to do it because you want them to know what it is like, fine. but when you start making arbitrary distinctions as to what makes it into the simulation, i start to get annoyed. the whole thing is such a goddamned farce, but with strange subjective teeth. if one is deemed "unprofessional", an a paper can quickly become a failure. i don't think she'd give me an a in the first place (i didn't go talk to her every day), whatever i get will definitely become an f if i go through with the hot pants thing. so, i will not be afforded an opportunity to appropriately expose the whole sham for what it is. instead, i will grumble quietly with my classmates, most of whom will profess to be annoyed at the empty exercise and proceed to take it as seriously as anything else they have ever encountered. conversation about the flaws of law school is constricted and ineffective, and i believe this is by design. the only way to really get people to listen these days requires not only playing the game to the hilt, but doing a better job of that than almost everyone else even when you do not believe in it. i just do not have that in me. mocking my education in a limited semi-formal atmosphere is a little more my speed, but i don't have the balls to pay the high price for the low payoff. so i am just gonna sit alone and type here and be unhappy with my life. after all, i'm spending a ton of money so i can do just that for the rest of my life. great move. remember that the law is always indeterminate and always political and this is so that power stays where it is. questions? call me.
on a lighter note, many many excellent photos of the ides of march march are available here. in fact, there are many excellent pictures there, including some stuff of my neighborhood. thanks for doing a great job with the documentation! they're sort of in reverse order, which really doesn't matter, but if you start on like page four those are the earliest ones, and you can go backwards from there. either way, there is plenty there to get a good idea of what exactly was going on, except without chanting. to recreate the effect, recruit anyone in the area of your computer to repeatedly cry out a warning to beware the ides of march march. if you see me, tell me to beware porches on the ides of march. i'm still pretty sore.
not a whole lot else to report. while i was doing laundry the other day, i noticed a girl with a metallica backpack. not like a backpack with some metallica shit on it, no, it was manufactured with plenty of embroidery and printing, all metallica stuff. she did not look like it would have been her backpack: too not metal to have it for its own sake, not cool enough to have it for sheer irony judging by her clothing and laundry. also, she was coloring the whole time. in a coloring book. totally old school. had quite the box of crayons, too, the really big one. she colored inside the lines and talked on a pink razr phone the whole time. this is why i do not need to take any form of personal distraction with me when i do laundry; the people watching is usually pretty prime. consider yourself updated.

beware the ides of march march

2008-03-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

well, i guess you don't really have to worry about it again for just shy of a year. yesterday was fairly eventful, but in those small times i was unbearably bored. i guess i have to do something, but i wish that was not going back to law school. maybe spend my time doing something where i make money instead of just spend it. but law school it is for now, hopefully i will be more eager to cram my life full of it than before the break, but i kind of doubt it. i re-read whatever i have for tomorrow; it came back pretty quick.
i didn't do a lot of law school stuff over the break because i managed to fill a lot of my time with actual things to do, for good or ill. as i mentioned, yesterday opened with a trip to beautiful, historic lancaster pa. i am not being sarcastic, although the billing the original noting gave the town (same thing) came off a little tongue-in-cheek. really nice place, really peaceful event, really helpful officer of the law. dude was a classic good cop. had a motorcycle. pissed that he is being forced into mandatory retirement in a couple months. i guarantee i wouldn't fuck with the guy even ten years from now. rode by the brewery but couldn't find it back on the way out of town, unfortunately. but our trip took us through or past many of the more notoriously named municipalities of the state: blue ball, intercourse, wagontown (stopped for a beer there after a long search for one) and of course bird-in-hand.
the trip actually got off on a bit of a bad foot, as the driver managed to get a ticket during the thirty seconds we checked the inside of a building for latecomers. parked at 901, ticked marked 903. the attendant truly showed up out of nowhere. after all, we were too people who were on our way to act in an exclusively observant manner.
when we were almost back to the city, my phone rang, a friend asking me something about some sort of parade. i was supposed to meet some people in a strange walkway between a movie theater/restaurant/bar and a rotunda (the rotunda, in fact). it was on my way back home from where i got dropped off. en route, ben saw me and after a few moments of confusion i figured out someone had indeed just yelled my name at me. so we got there a little early; only one other person was already there.
i had no idea what to expect. we all talked for a while, but not a whole lot of information had come to light on what was exactly going to go down. i had heard talk for a few weeks, something about a banner, a parade, and an assassination of julius caeser. i wasn't clear on whether it was related to saint patrick's day (thankfully, far from it, although there were three rollerbladers with segments of a snake like a split up version resembling one of those chinese dragons in parades) or how big it was supposed to be.
when everyone was assembled, we numbered about twenty, including a couple of people shooting still and video. almost everybody was dressed in some striking manner, a lot of face paint (i saw a lot of painted faces that day between the march and the protest which included a small troupe of leftist clowns from some university). the variety and particularities of everything are quite difficult to describe, but the good news is that i'm sure pictures and perhaps even film will show up on the the interwebs and duly linked from here. enough people looking and behaving strangely enough to attract attention, but not so many as to cause an offensive/possibly illegal disturbance. there was already enough going on in the area we were in: some "irish" bars get together and literally bus people around to different bars all day. i think if i found out how much bud lite (not marked!) was consumed, i would literally vomit on the the information source. rampant douchebaggery.
made the whole thing subversive in a different way. the occasion was the ides of march, and it was a march, see. the ides of march... march. so we chanted "beware the ides of march march" for most of the time while we wandered along our ten or so block amble. also "no explanation!" at some points. the journey took us through some clusters of green t-shirt and bead folks who were alternately hostile, excitable, or so hammered they were too busy doing their own thing.
unfortunately, i was not dressed silly, because i was coming back from lancaster, and i had not been there as either a liberal (the one who got mike time remarked he had "had it up to my big red nose this war and this administration!") or any other sort of clown. i just got a little bit of the surprisingly adequate arsenal of weaponry. at the end of the line, caeser was indeed stabbed, and that was that. good times, look forward to the pictures.
the march itself and the ides of march both provided an independent good-as-any reason for a party. it was a lot of fun. knew a lot of people, met a lot of people, good mix, good music. for a while a band played, mandolin, guitar (acoustic), squeezebox and flute is their usual lineup. but this time my friend played fiddle with them, to fantastic results. unfortunately there was also an accident wherein my face was damaged. i'll be alright; could have been much worse. really close to an eye, which is a weird place to get scraped up. overall, though, a good time. friendly argument with some guy whose phone number, despite my vocal skepticism, really did only contain three digits through the whole sequence of ten. met some fellow dinosaur comics afficianados. someone had a bottle of everclear. i did not involve myself with that. and yet, i still somehow have minor scrapings in strange places. life isn't all bad, really.

geel jas

2008-03-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

say it with me now. geel jas. sounds like hail yass, a bizarre approximation (today is a day of approximation: pi day) of hell yes. but it really means yellow jacket in dutch. it took me an alarming amount of time to notify my sister of this fact, given her yellow jacket. the original popularity of the phrase (in my life, at least) draws from the wolf's striking garment of the same type. the wolf called me the other day from california, where he is apparently changing light bulbs in target stores for the next several months. right now he is in l.a., which is a tough geographic/municipal concept for me. it is one of those places that is so big that it sort of includes things that have other names, but i am unclear as to what extent places nominally separate from los angeles are somehow integrated with it. anyway, the wolf was enthusiastic about acquiring a ralph's card and looking forward to perhaps visiting some lebowski landmarks, especially the bowling alley.
it occurred to me that i knew nothing about the bowling alley they used, so i did a little digging. unsurprisingly, the imdb trivia page for the movie had my answer (along with some other pretty decent trivia that would have stumped me - bunny's license plate!?). if you don't want to sort through it all, let me just say they TORE IT DOWN and there is now an elementary school on that piece of land. most people, including myself, are loathe to disparage new schools for kids, but this situation is surely a shame. on the other hand, one day some of those kids will grow up and get into the movie (i believe it will transcend generations) and be like hey, see that bowling alley? i went to elementary school there. well, not at the alley, but on that land. and hopefully whoever they are telling will be suitably impressed. i still kind of can't believe it is not there though, but i guess its nonexistence is also somehow appropriate. i didn't find out until after i was done talking to the wolf, and i am afraid he will be quite disappointed. i wanted to leave him a message and tell him that we had received some terrible news and i was in seclusion in the west wing, but his voice mail has been full so that no one can leave a message for about one month less than he has owned that phone. it will be more difficult to break the news in person, but i guess i can still use that line.
i would much rather be changing light bulbs in california, i think. not that things have been particularly bad here, it is spring break after all. more on that later. but even while i'm on break, it is always on my mind. this is a major difference between going to school and having a bullshit job: relatively minor hourly waged jobs are easy to forget about when you're not there. law school makes me feel bad about not doing much for it while i'm supposed to be on vacation from it. seems to be no getting away from it, but i guess a lot of people i go to school with have a good forty years of never getting away from thinking about the law for a sustained period of time to look forward to.
i've been thinking the most (but not doing too much, don't worry) about the one specific thing a prof instructed us not to think about over the break. i finished writing the brief last week and i think it went alright. dude's brief got a little dinged up by staples. i had to go through three staplers to find one that worked just right; the prof already mentioned she was going to be anal about stapling. three down the left side, not so short that their hold is questionable (most traditional staplers) or so long that sharp parts stick up (most big-stack staplers). i did my best, and that was the very last thing i had to do, so i was ready to have it over with regardless.
anyway, so the brief is done but i have to do oral arguments for it, which was the one thing i was not supposed to think about. it is on a sunday, which is weak, and with a vague but possibly grade-influencing dressing requirement. that is about as frustrating as any of the rest of the class i guess, so it is appropriate. i was talking about suits last night, and how i actually really like to wear them, but i just want to wear one depending on whether or not i feel like it at the time. i dislike their ubiquitous presence in some contexts. i fee like this is one of those times where it will not technically be required but absolutely every male will have one. except maybe me. i didn't bring one with me, which was kind of stupid, and i have turned down offers from my parents to get me a new one before. i do, however, live near a pretty good-sized second-hand store that might have something i dig. we shall see.
i am arguing against someone i do not know, which came as a surprise to me. i only found out a couple of weeks ago by accident that there was another legal writing section doing the same basic assignment. i haven't exactly gone to a whole lot of trouble to learn people's names, especially full names, and so when i glanced at the schedule and recognized a couple of pairings, i assumed i was arguing against someone who i recognized but whose last name i did not know. turns out most people are arguing against people from the other class, but ours is bigger and so a couple people who actually know each other have to argue against one another. i think i might be a little more comfortable with that, but it is hard to say. i do know there are plenty of people in my class i am sure i don't want to argue with, and since i don't know the girl i'm facing i don't have to worry about necessarily dealing with her anytime soon in another context.
like i said i've been thinking about it a lot, and today i was considering actually replacing 'brief' with 'hot pants' during argumentation, especially when answering the judges' questions. performative (marked! fuck you, spell check!) critical legal studies in the most appropriate forum. i have not encountered any direct reference to cls in law school, and i am disappointed but not really surprised. high school debate taught me about a couple sort of obscure things. cls had its time, but it was kind of a while ago and limited by some not entirely unfounded criticisms. however, talking about hot pants instead of briefs is about as good as trashing gets in my opinion. i talked about cls for a presentation back in the day for my philosophy of law class. it was either that or something else that cls led me to, but the prof had not heard of it. mostly because it is not all that reputable. the point is, it is as good and probably better than any defense of the status quo. hot pants exposes the indeterminacy of both language in and about the law, along with opening supposedly at-best arbitrary structures for examination to reveal inherent power dynamics. go hot pants. the sinister part in all this is that i will probably not actually show up and say hot pants (it would be difficult to remember to always do it) because i am successfully disciplined to some degree by grades due to the relationship between them and attracting potential employment. also, law school is such an anti-academic environment that i think it would fail to generate meaningful conversation. most people would just kind of think it was weird and be happy that i would probably wind up wolding down the low left end of the curve for that class.
now i'm definitely thinking about it too much. it is a beautiful day here. i already went for a small walk for drum and cold cuts, and i wished i hadn't worn more than a t-shirt and jeans. maybe even the crocs. unfortunately, my left achilles is sore. probably screwed it up having a good time at some point over the past week of brief finishing/spring break. otherwise i probably would have walked further because it is so fantastic. the good news is that i am not so injured that i am prevented from walking up the street to enjoy a good beer on a great porch on a fantastic afternoon, so i am going to go do that. but i can't post yet because the internet is not working, so i'll just take a break.
well it clouded up and got cold about half an hour after i sat down on the porch, but it was still pretty excellent while it lasted. it was still nice enough to walk up to the distributor and pick up a case. splitting a rack of sly fox pale ale cans. i remember having it pretty early on in the festival and being suitably impressed. hopefully the context didn't overshadow the beer, but i am confident it will be quite good. i am thoroughly taken in by the pro-can propaganda (portability, freshness, etc.); and it seems more appropriate to me for things like pales and pilsners. plenty of styles where it wouldn't be appropriate as the mild aging from bottles has a pleasing effect on the brew, but i hope to see more microbreweries make use of canning. more on this beer after it sits in the fridge for a few. cans, you know, chill quicker. i expected them to be a little cheaper, but this place's prices aren't that great on some things. still a pretty good deal because i got to split the case, so i got to commit to less and i still get good cheap beer that'll last a week or so. i never appreciated the utility of being able to purchase beer conveniently and at a generally reasonable price in six-pack or twelve-pack form. i can still get those things, but not at a reasonable price, and only easily by happenstance.
in the meantime, let's go back to pi day for a second. it is a pretty excellent concept when you think about it. pi, that is, not necessarily the day approximating it. one of those things that shows up an awful lot of places and seems a little more credible and uncanny than the golden ratio. also, this poem to remember twenty digits of the approximation amuses me:
Sir, I send a rhyme excelling
In sacred truth and rigid spelling
Numerical sprites elucidate
For me the lexicon's full weight
each word's letters are the number, see. 3.14159, etc. thanks, someone from england commenting on the bbc news piece. i don't feel bad about not specifically citing someone who is using a screen name to post something they were probably taught in high school or whatever the equivalent is. probably the best thing i have seen come out of having pi day is this. just cracks me up. also makes me look forward to july.
the sly fox is pretty excellent. i could have left it to get a little colder, but i am not disappointed about opening it. comes across the palate kind of viscous for a pale, full on american with the hops though, my kind of a pale. poured it into a glass and i almost regret it. oh well, i've got a few more, i will be glad to compare the experience soon. nothing too crazy going on here, and i don't think there has to be for a good solid pale like this. well-balanced, right up there with yards and founders. with the added bonus of the can. i can dig it. hehe. i am ready for something straightforward like this after the magic hat variety pack.
i didn't do a whole lot in terms of beer week events, but it has certainly been a beer-y enough week for me. chuck visited, and so we hit a couple of the real good spots, made it to both monk's and eulogy. eulogy had bell's hopslam on tap, which is fantastic. i liked it a lot better than i remembered. i don't know if they've changed something about it or if it is really that much better on tap or what, but whatever the reason, it really hit the spot. the best aroma of all time. like if there was such a thing as a hops jolly rancher, it would smell kinda like this beer. also had bear republic's red rocket, which is a scotch ale. i found it passable but unremarkable, wholly unworthy of its reputation as a wild and crazy beer. i was willing to give bear republic another go, though, and my first pick at monk's was a racer 5, their ipa. pretty incredible, enough to make me a believer in the columbus hop i had written off as a bastardized bittering agent. another perfectly balanced beer, which is becoming more and more of a well-practiced science as more and more brewers just keep getting more and more experience. real keeper. next beer was called hop it or something, from a dutch brewer i was unfamiliar with and whose name i cannot recall. supposedly inspired by the brewer's experience with american double ipas, it was a decidedly lowlands interpretation. sort of worked out to be a relatively hoppy but otherwise extremely proper belgian witbier, although the closest approximation i can think of might be the one that unibrou makes. interesting, but didn't have the hops or body i hoped for, but expectations aside, a pretty good beer. certainly unique. i was really wowed by the close-out, cantillon geuze. oh man. they were possibly out when my sister ordered one before me, but no, there was one more, and even enough for me to get one of my own. perhaps my favorite geuze so far. so funky. only george clinton himself could have turned up the funk more. totally delicious.
came at the right time, too, after dinner. my meal was bar none the hottest wings i have ever encountered. if i am going to get wings, i will always go for whatever is supposed to be the hottest. sometimes i am let down, sometimes i am impressed, but never have i come so close to questioning my ability to handle the heat. they were so damn hot. the nice thing was that they were four actual real chicken wings, not just pieces of wings sold as "wings". but they were so hot. it wasn't like they were even in a sauce, more like smeared with some paste made out of a little water and mostly crushed chilies. i don't know what kind, just that they were so fuckin hot. i am almost starting to flush and sweat just remembering the intensity. totally worth it though. i'm still probably going to get mussels when i go back next time. but they were good, and i feel like my search for the hottest wings anywhere has ended, and this will forever be the measure all future spicy foods are compared to in my mind.
oh yeah, i also had a lot of fun doing things with my brother other than indulging my palette. he helped us win a few bucks at quizzo, which featured an allegedly impossible bonus round question my sister and i yelled out the answer to at the same time. after the regular game, the dude running things asks questions and people just yell out the answer to win dollar store prizes. he was all, no one can get this one, in the netherlands, who is santa claus' helper or something along those lines, and before he was even finished we both yelled zwarte piet! and the dude was like huh? and so we yelled it again, and he was still confused, but my sister figured he wanted black piet, and she was right. pretty funny though, good family moment. chuck and i went to see the sixers, and that was a lot mroe fun than i thought it would be, discounting the annoying chick from boston sitting next to me. the game went by really quick, but it was fun. we saw the flyers, and that was even better. sports events are almost universally better to see live, and that doesn't get a lot of argument. but even if it is more fun to be there and more enjoyable over all, something shouldn't be harder to follow on tv. this was my first live nhl game, and damned if it isn't twice as easy to follow the play in person. they run way too many cameras for that shit. we went to the art museum, and chuck ran up the stairs all rocky style. that was pretty money to see. we did the mutter museum of medical oddities as well, which was still fun, but not as rewarding on the return trip as the art museum predictably was. part of the appeal the mutter has though is that you haven't seen these things before, i think, whereas the art museum deals with things that are a little more timeless in some ways. in fact, i liked some of the stuff i had already seen so much that i still went again even though there are a couple parts i still have to go to. all the more reason to go back. my favorite things are the complete rooms, where the whole thing is designed in a specific style or, in the best cases, actually is a literal room from whatever time and place. big fan of all the stuff from india, and the temple room is by far the coolest, although the abbey courtyard is also a big draw for me. so much good stuff, and the effect of a whole room is really helpful. i am hard pressed to think of something bad to say about the art museum. i guess i was a little underwhelmed with the one video installation. it was a guy from the shoulders or lower down do the ground while he walked around and dragged a drumstick along railings and tapped various metal things he passed. it hung together well enough and they timed it up to do some nifty things, but its best effect was really merely being heard throughout other parts of the wing. the footage itself wasn't anything to speak of, and i'm sure it wasn't the focus, but whatever. i was actually kind of hoping for something a little stranger i guess. i like contemporary art because it makes me think about all sorts of things whenever i see it. certainly a different experience from looking at some sweet northern renaissance engravings, which i enjoy just as much but in an entirely different way. people can stereotype and deride a lot of contemporary art and artists for plenty of reasons i can understand, but it just seems like the wrong way to approach it. let's face it, plenty of people involved with art have probably always kind of been dicks about it, this is nothing new. it is also certainly not new for art to be totally noisome to society writ large. sorry about all that, my siblings were willing to give that branch a pass this time around more or less so i had to go on about it for a minute in some way.
i have just discovered that i have to be waiting in front of a building about a dozen blocks away at nine tomorrow morning. i have some serious mixed feelings about that. i am going to lancaster, and i always like to go someplace new, wherever it might be. but i have to catch a ride, which beats the train for price, but has its own drawbacks. i will be observing, so i had better find my notebook and hope it isn't too damaged from the festival the other week where i was certainly participating as opposed to just observing. good thing my beer notations will never possibly play a role in anyone else's trial. i don't anticipate having a whole lot to do tomorrow, but you never know. i'll find out all too soon.

rockin' OOT

2008-03-04T16:28:00.000-08:00

that's right, with an overdone canadian accent, 'cause that's how we do it. i was moving even slower than normal on this hot pants (no longer brief - hot pants). then i put on some BOC. great double live album called terrestrial alien or something else nonsensical like that. all i know is progress has improved except for occasional air drumming. great blend of classic rock and early early metal. the first side opens with a song featuring call-and-response between the band and the audience where the crowd yells "dominance!" and the vocalist replies "submission!". the next tune talks about cities in flame with rock and roll, and in the one after that the lyrics repeatedly permit everyone to refer to the lead singer as "doctor music". what more do you want?

beer festival, karnes?

2008-03-03T20:16:00.000-08:00

i guess going to a beer festival is kind of the mother of all beer runs. predictably, it was a damn good time. innumerable selections i had never seen, and plenty of solid standby brewers with the occasional odd batch. i realized early on i would have to make a lot of choices. i'm bad at choices, but this was about as easy as it could get. no way to lose. the only "problem" was getting too many generous pours. it seems nice, but when you really just want to try 2 oz. of something, a double dose on an already full stomach is a little much. one of the best beers i had was actually my kickoff sample. southampton publick house. french style called biere de mars i had not previously been acquainted with. not too surprisingly, the translation is beer of march. i preferred it vastly to most of the "spring" beers i've had, mostly decent bocks (just not my thing usually) and a few normal styles simply market as spring-seasonal. i went in looking for hops, and i hit a few real good ones. one vermont place i hadn't heard of before the festival, rock art brewery had a brew called vermonster that i particularly enjoyed, just what i was looking for at the time, double ipa. dude servin' it up was in some sort of vintage naval uniform and had the longest beard i have ever seen. lots of interesting looking people at the event, and plenty of people who seemed confused, but mostly people seeming tipsy. this place represented for milwaukee with a solid ipa and an anniversary (20th!? i never saw these guys back home) belgian strong. both big and balanced. arcadia was even there, and i got to grab a hopmouth. you can see where i might think i wound up going too heavy on the hops even for me. i was rewarded for my perseverance later in the evening when i tracked down the green flash table. true west coast ipa. sometimes nothing is better. they were only pouring bottles, but the aroma was still incredible. nothing but pacific northwest hops as far as i could tell at that point. the server told me "the search is over," which is a great slogan but a little presumptuous, given the ambiguity. however, if he meant the most west coast of all ipas, then i would really have to agree. other than my hop gluttony, i had a lot of mediocre belgian styles. on the other hand, my palate got a little tore up. a price i'm willing to pay if i can still select from a couple dozen beers so bitter i can still taste anything from that selection after having a couple of them. on the other hand, there were also a couple others that do not have the excuse of some minute delicacies that still failed to pass muster, before, during, and after all the international bitterness unit blowout. i had tried three purported rye beers, all of which disappointed. i don't know what founders did, but that was my primary reference and i expected some serious rye. letdown. but they were beers i tried, and now i know. these are some of the many highlights. i cannot recommend the experience enough. from the opportunity to gain a spectrum of experience across a particular style to being in a giant room full of people (kind of felt like a busy train station, long and with really really high ceilings, but like if EVERYONE had been drinking) who eventually do the beer fest wave of raising your glass and yelling whoooo with all the enthusiasm of people who are pretty much a) beer geeks in heaven b) people who think beer fest is a great movie and thought it would be sweet to get as hammered as possible at this thing or c) people who went along to fit in and necessarily co-operate. almost, but not quite, too much fun to handle.
i finally got a hold of a couple of wilco's residency shows. first night and the last night are all i have so far. next one i get will probably be an '01 show. from detroit, no less.anyway, i got to listen to tweedy bitch and moan about how bad "i thought i held you" is. the funny part is that he must have always thought so, and yet he put it on the record. wilco had never ever in any form played that song on stage. the only wilcobase entry was from some radio live in-studio shit. he literally calls it dog shit before they play it on the last night. he sings it halfheartedly and in a borderline mocking tone, but the band plays it really well and he does make note of that. the thing i've enjoyed the most about hearing cuts that aren't in normal circulation is the inherent diversity of the set lists. this version of the band does an amazing job of demonstrating the deceptive continuity of records that all have a different style. most of all they're having fun, and it makes for some fun listening. the horns are really the perfect touch on some things, i can almost even listen to 'i'm the man who loves you'. almost. i like rapidly approaching zero things about that song. but they really pull some things together, especially a couple of the new tunes. it really does make 'walken' sound like a little feat song; one of the trib's reviews mentioned that. the recordings are as pristine as i hoped. wilco in chicago is pretty much a foregone conclusion: it is gonna sound sweet. the band and the tapers both know the venues there so well. but sound is nothing without playing well, and much of this was ideal.
i don't really have a whole lot else to report; i've been spending a lot of time on the inevitable brief. i'm getting there, but progress is painfully slow. it happens so slowly and painstakingly. no flow to the process, terminally boring at points. i'm happy with where i am mostly. a lot better than i was off with this much time left on the memo last semester. tomorrow will mostly be the assemblage of information in obscure formatting. totally a pain in the ass nobody needs. but the court cannot do without it, and so we have to do it this way this time even though jurisdictions vary greatly. the ultimate in hoop-jumping. well, whatever. i'm sure i'll manage. i also need to find blue card stock for the front and back covers. of six copies of the same thing that i have to turn in. awesome. the battle against word has been going well. i am sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, but i got the goddam tabs to be where i needed throughout the whole document. i save so compulsively now. waiting for another word processing terrorist to bomb a few more paragraphs.
as you may have noticed, this blog has finished determining why, and the answer is that's just the way it is. i personally voted for something else, just so i could complain about whatever won. if i would have needed to modify the poll for some reason, i could have done that too i guess (and i have reason to believe someone else manipulated it as some sort of statistical joke). but really, that's just the way it is deserves to be the answer because it was the only one with a well-known theme song. an excellent theme song. another poll is hardly worthwhile once we've answered the ultimate question, but we'll see. that answer was sort of a fallacy...

take a deep breath and count to ten

2008-02-29T19:39:00.000-08:00

think of all the nice places that i've been, like back when i was waging peace against the visigoths i was tutored in the ancient mysteries by a wizened philosoph, learned the polyrhythm of celestial time, wait for the one to come, to get it done, finish the rhyme
but no, seriously, the advice should be to take a deep drink and count to ten. but i guess we don't always have a beer at hand. shame about that. but i feel a little better. i like how the title for the last post lined up just about right, nice unexpected bonus. i also like how i have a variety case of magic hat, but i kind of expected that to still be there after i bought it earlier today. although, who knows, i could have opened a bottle to find the label was wrong, or the beers had somehow mixed like my document. it is also not a case, really, but two twelve packs. at the end of the day, four beers, six of each, thirty bucks. not so bad. except i am still down on hefeweizen. i don't know if i'll ever warm up to wheat beer again. circus boy is a fine hefeweizen, especially for an american one, but meh. i figured i would drink 'em when i was just drinking to have a beer, not to necessarily get real into it. beats pabst by a long shot. and lager. when you consider the fact that a six pack of lager will cost more than six craft brews bought in case form, the answer is easy. i don't know why i thought it would be so tough to carry a case of beer a few blocks. totally worth it. it will be more worth it when i'm drinking other stuff from the case though. number nine of course, and one i haven't had called odd notion. it is apparently some sort of a red ale. could be good or pretty boring. i'll let you know, maybe even later in this post depending on how long i type for. the other beer is the spring seasonal, the hi.p.a. which i believe i have already reviewed in this space after buying a single. if you want to know about it but you don't want to hunt for it in the shitstorm of this blog's archives, let me just say it is an odd one, not enough hops for me, but a pleasant roasty character not typical to the style. magic hat usually fails the authentic to style test, but that is not necessarily a bad thing all the time. i've always respected them, but that is sort of waning as they get their marketing on. it is getting kind of silly, almost like they are the ben and jerry's of beer just cause they're the biggest brewer in vermont. they haven't named beers after people yet really, but a visit to the website reveals what they're up to, especially with this particular variety pack. overall, i guess if their marketing strategy means three dollar pints at jam (man i hate that word but i'd rather call the stuff jammy than hippie) shows at well-known venues, i can't bitch too much.
i'm looking forward to getting some otter creek at the festival tomorrow; haven't had that since i was in vermont. hard to believe that was three and a half years ago. the experience remains a highlight in my memories. makes me wish i had decided to spend my time pursuing activities like that instead of going to law school. i could have worked my same old job and made better use of my free time. now i have a decision between wasting a ton of money on a degree i don't really use or working a job that pays me plenty and gives me no time to spend it. i know things aren't really so simplistic, but it is just one more explanation of how i fucked up.
because now i'm sitting here, with not as much done as i had planned or hoped, but a complete inability to do anymore today. writing used to be my favorite. but i got to write sort of about things that interested me. oh yeah, also grades were not positively correlated to writing like/being a total fucking asshole. furthermore, they never ruined my fridays like this.
so i just cracked an odd notion. it is way better than i had even hoped for. awesome beer, all about the malt flavors, and a malt-centric beer has to go the extra mile to make a believer out me; hops are my main concern most of the time. the hops take a back seat, but they're definitely hanging out in there keeping it bitter. just making sure nothing gets sweet without having a whole lot crazy to say, like a great bass player who doesn't stick her neck out too much. i know this main flavor but i cannot for the life of me pin it down right now. real bready, kinda biscuit-y, a little spicy, got a little rye character going on, but not so much that i would guess they actually used rye malt. oh, yeah, this is excellent. i could happily drink like twelve of these. if you see this beer, get it. let me know what that flavor is. i feel like i tasted it the other day, but i can't remember what it was i ate/drank that contributed. is it ginger lurking in there? i dunno. good chunk of chocolate (named for color not flavor) malt going on too, more than i expected from a beer like this; it has a seemingly stout-like portion of the stuff. end result is something that could pass for a red ale on looks, but one taste and you'd know one scoop of black patent and a couple minor tweaks could have made porter of it. the color is a little deceiving, but i'll be gladly fooled by this brew any time. overall, the beer comes off as really fresh, and i hope that does not decline in shipping, but the sooner you get your hands on it the better. it is so fresh that i feel like i'm at founders and i can throw the shucks from my peanuts on my carpet. when does the band start? well, i feel better about choosing this case for purchase given this beer. as it stood it had been one beer that is good but i could do without, one beer i enjoy thoroughly but never want much of, one beer i really liked that still left me wanting something (unfairly so on my part - too much troegs nugget nectar), and one beer i knew nothing about, which turned out to be one beer i really really dig. might unseat roxy rolles as the best i've had from these guys. this is truly bitchin, a lot going on in a style that is usually a little too straightforward. people label the typical examples "good session beers" but i would way rather session on something that has a twist to it most of the time, personally. if fat tire were a kid, it would grow up to be odd notion. i love fat tire, and that is a beer that has more going on than you'd expect too, which is how it made a name for itself, but this just seems like a more realized and fulfilled iteration. the label on the odd notion includes a really small figure riding a bike. subtle dig? now i'm just reading too much into beer labels.
the cats were just wrestling, then switched to just licking each other. now they're holding still but whenever either moves they are wrestling again. they are so pretty and so little. they quit doing that a while ago and i stopped typing, but now one was hanging out in the room with me. he stayed gamely through three powerful sneezes, but he fled in absolute terror at the fourth one for some reason. they got to say hi today to the stange neighbor who lent me the carrier for straw. she is moving out, but she was really excited to see me. she wanted to know if i could help her out by keeping an ancient computer monitor in my apartment because she was worried that when she moved out they would lock her door (probably won't happen knowing the landlord). it was not a problem, and i told her as much, and so she went and got the monitor. i am thankfully not here all the time, and she realized this and said she needed my number. after a brief search for a pen, i started to recite the number. before i was even finished giving it, she suggested she could just leave the monitor in the small hall/landing area that only our apartments are on. no one but us ever really goes up there, and she was already planning on picking it up tomorrow. so after this awkward drawn out interaction, we concluded it was unnecessary. i know it isn't really a funny story, but i just kind of wanted to attempt to convey how odd the whole thing was on its own, without being there or knowing her. i do wish her all the best; she understands cats, living with them, and accepting their prettiness fairly well. but beyond that, she is a person who has lived a principled and tenacious life. i believe knowing a neighbor is not what it once was. sometimes it is difficult to pick apart projections into the past, especially the relatively short history of this particular country.
neighbor is a loaded term to anyone who has even a baseline understanding of either testament of the christian bible. i wish i knew something about how it translates in other languages. neighbor is a highly social concept and so i would imagine it varies greatly from culture to culture and hence in linguistic terms as well. get your hermeneutics on.
i am currently listening to sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band. my feelings toward the album itself are entirely positive, but the feelings i have for one bill born are thoroughly mixed. i am pleased that he took reasonbly good (god dammit law school) care of his records, and he had decent taste, but i wish he hadn't felt the need to thoroughly label every piece of every element of whatever packaging a piece of vinyl included, along with the actual thing. i have this one from bill born, another beatles record, and something else really good i do not recall right now. if i don't have a post-revolver beatles record, i will prefer playability over all else. that strategy landed me a copy of the white album including the famous four photos, one of each one of them. without bill born's esteemed autograph, mercifully.
my current setup tends to emphasize ringo's cymbal work (a.k.a. the speakers are pretty crappy), but i'm glad to hear it. ringo's drumming in general came up in a really good interview i read earlier today (it is fine if you don't click because you have better things to do or whatever, but if you passed it up because you read the site before you clicked the link, double indemnity on you). musicians are usually marginally better than athletes when it comes to being articulate, but this was pretty impressive. the guy will have played with three really excellent this year before it is even half over. and he actually has some thoughtful things to say about music. there's a little more background info than anyone out there probably cares for, but when you get a few paragraphs in things start to get worthwhile.
well, i didn't finish this in any way last night so i didn't post it, but i have to actually work on something important now, so this is it for now. today has kicked off pretty awesome, with some 888 number calling and waking me up at 8 and a small child screaming like forty minutes later made sure i didn't get back to sleep. excellent. oh well, i'm going to a beer festival.

FUCK fuckity fuck fuck motherfuckin fucksticks

2008-02-29T18:43:00.000-08:00

i cannot even express how pissed off i am right now. i have been able to feel my blood throb for about the last half hour. i was diligently pasting a case citation into my brief when i inadvertently stumbled on a document mine which exploded most of what i had done over the last couple hours (which was saved but wouldn't restore) throughout everything that had been there before. single words, pieces of words, halves of citations, random formatting all scattered throughout. GOD DAMNIT. seriously, what the fuck is with that. so i spent about half an hour cleaning it all up, losing god knows what. i was having so much trouble sitting down and doing productive work, and then i finally manage to do some, and then the craziest bullshit happens. i think the cig i had immediately after it happened was gone in like two minutes. i contemplated breaking into the liquor store since THEY CLOSE AT NINE and i need to guzzle a fifth. what i really want to do is go into a fine china shop or something full of fragile shit and just go to town with a baseball bat. instead i'm sitting here tearing up cardboard and typing this. i am typing SO HARD right now. at this point, i expect the baby jesus to appear before me and be like "what more do you want for a sign that you should not go to law school? you shouldn't even need a fucking sign! what are you doing here anyway?" oh, back to word for a moment, the best part about all of this is that it came about as a result of an autocorrect function. man, i am still pretty seriously pissed. i was just gonna post this but i am having connection problems. as i sit here, i just keep muttering to myself about how upset i am, even though i of all people should be perfectly aware of the extent of my pissed off-ness.

YOU'RE a prescriptive easement

2008-02-25T20:24:00.000-08:00

just can't seem to get it right. spent all weekend trying to write a brief with no success, but a promise to get at it today. as soon as i finished my reading. then i read for the next seven hours, and no, i'm not writing it at this point. i will need to accomplish a lot by saturday to feel alright about going to a beer festival. some things just can't be helped i guess. the michigan brewers guild had their winter beer festival at old kent park. such a better name than fifth-third; numbered entities should not be able to hold naming rights to sports. it only leads to strange connotations when at all translated to any given sport. anyway, i bet no one reading who lives nearby actually went. i realize y'all (not marked, sweet) have lives, but c'mon (marked, weak) a beer festival is a thing to get to. expect a detailed report on the one here sometime next week.
after the beer festival, back 40 played a cd release party at founders, and i know some people made it to that. hoping for a recording. the point is, i missed what was potentially the day of the year back home. who knows, something could have always gone wrong, but that combination is tough to deny. i am not so spiteful to wish i could say the weather had been shitty and new founders sucks, but in any event the weather was nice and the sound in the new space is vastly preferable. i am sure both events facilitated good times for a wide variety of people, and it is good to know things like that still go on. all this serves my notion that gun rue is not a terrible place to be from, regardless of what anyone says. it feels strange to write about things i wasn't doing, but it is comforting to know they still sound appealing.
also, i was not doing a whole lot interesting during that time. as noted, i was mostly throwing myself at what amounted to a whole wall comprised of writer's blocks. i did, however watch blazin' saddles. this is one of those movies that virtually everyone i know thinks is hilarious. if you haven't seen it, i cannot express the level of priority it should immediately take. presumably, most people have seen it, so watch it again. dude punches out a horse. what more do you want? mel brooks talking for about an hour? because my dvd totally had that, labeled as an interview. no questions are included, and many things seem like they could never be the answer to any sane question. he just runs his mouth while the movie plays with no sound. he says plenty of interesting things, including how they had two horses on the set who were trained to fake a fall when an unseen fish line tugs at their leg. for the animal concerned, this is precisely what they used in the horse punching scene.
you realize what this means: if horses know how to sell a fell, we could easily have horse pro wrestling. they'd call it h.w.c., purportedly heavy weight championship (competitors must conveniently weigh literally as much as an average horse), but really just horse wrestling championship. the whole thing wouldn't hit stride until wwe buys it out and integrates it so the horses wrestle against people. get your tickets, kids seats just five bucks. saturday, Saturday, SATURDAY. and yes, at the delta plex.
see, i would have missed that too. at least i watched blazin' saddles. i also managed to go someplace i hadn't been before, which is ridiculously easy for me to do still. odd little space, teahouse/restaurant (fusion? i think i'm guessing/extrapolating) with a little bar in it. went with my sister and chilled out on a friday afternoon, overall something to make me happy about living here. the place happens to be named bubble house, which brings me to something else i didn't do. medeski martin and wood played a few days ago at penn. no one mentioned this to me before it happened, but no less than three separate people told me in the next couple days after the show. guess i should have checked the tour dates. one last thing i managed to not do on saturday was see wilco. sold out way before i even knew it was going to happen. the only solution is to buy tickets for anything i see online, pay some stupid surcharge, and get spam forever telling me about every single fucking band at their mediocre venue. i definitely would have known if wilco played the state theater in detroit, or if mmw played at the house of blues in cleveland.
well, this was the post that was supposed to be for yesterday but i couldn't post it due to connectivity problems. i figured i would post it when i got to school in the morning. and then i looked and the last couple paragraphs were gone. apparently the last time the thing auto-saved was while i agonized over the spelling of "cleveland", eventually resorting to quick research. yeah, i totally had it wrong. but how often have i needed to spell cleveland? not too often, that is how much.
anyway, i think the other stuff was mostly about law school. something about how contextualization is generally lacking. law reviews skewed my notion of law school, etc.. ubiquitous puns in law review titles, blah blah, my con law prof is awesome. something along those lines. maybe something about how absolutely fucked i am. we probably did not lose anything the record is worse off without.
this gets us to today, which really doesn't offer a whole lot more. i'm still freaking out about my brief. today featured a full-on large scale second guessing of my approach to the issue that controls the entirety of my argument. have i misinterpreted my prof's comments? will she be up front if i have? will she tell me what it is she wants? time will tell. the only upshot is that i get to give myself the rest of the night off, which is only an upshot tonight, and regret fodder for tomorrow.
my school email inbox is enough to induce a panic attack on its own (except the one about the ABA and LSD, but that wasn't near as interesting as it sounded). most recent arrivals note the upcoming financial aid and work study deadlines, along with a host of comments from my writing prof answering INANE questions other people have asked. i am so confused about how these people could be better off than i am, if this is what they are asking. they're so proactive that they have asked about minutia before i've settled the most important question. and yet, i could answer their questions. i want to scream. also, i failed in class today. i could not figure out what my prof was asking me; i first asked him to repeat the question and then had to concede i just could not answer because i had no idea what he wanted. through a couple flukes i got asked about a case i read like three weeks ago. i understood what the case said, but his wording was just bizarre. well, whatever. just frustrating, especially considering i had put extra preparation into the next few cases, the ones i thought i might be asked to talk about. i could have talked ad naseum about anything else he asked anyone else, but no, it couldn't be simple. so it goes.
apparently something blew up in eastown today. i am glad i was not back home getting evacuated. i probably would have been at work, i guess. if i was home, i wager i would have been either sleeping or too sketched out to open the door to talk to whoever comes to tell people to evacuate. i seem to remember this would not have been the first time.
instead, the most important thing of my day was finding out about this. i suspect i'm late in the game like everything else, but on the off chance that someone has not seen this, it is worth checking out. i have an awful lot of things to say about it, but i will spare you all for now. i'm just glad it manages to be provocative and inviting. so tempted to go on and on... the only disappointment is that as far as i've covered, they have not included the site itself on the list. i'll pass on lampooning it for now. all i can think about is fair use and parody. the upshot is that we listened to none other than the 2 live crew in intellectual property the other day. this was one of the worthwhile things that disappeared from yesterday's inchoate post. in fact, my prof listened to this particular track with none other than ruth bader-ginsberg, for whom he was clerking when the case came down. parody roy orbison, will you? i guess so. acuff-rose was a party in the case, and i kept hearing that tweedy tune in my mind.
i recall noting that this 2 live crew track included no cusses. and the opinion footnoted a definition of rap music. classic. the best is probably that the official title of the case includes "AKA luke skyywalker".
i have likewise been going somewhat old school with music this evening. broke out the cd book, one of the strangest out there, but some things i don't mind hearing. tonight has featured the kottonmouth kings and iron maiden. yup. i don't regret any of that. the cd collection stopped growing several years ago now, and the end result has been that i own much more of the music i currently enjoy on vinyl. bargains galore. but it is nice to go back and play some things i haven't heard in a while. no, i do not own any 2 live crew of my own. but my birthday is coming up...
right now we are talking about the lorax. i cannot believe how many people in this class have never heard of it. the biggest upshot is that i found this and it has gotten me through most of the pointless discussion. man, people just like to hear themselves talk. the worst part is we are more or less in an extended discussion of utilitarianism, framed as an alternative to making moral judgments. of course, this is a fiction - "knowing" what is good for people inheres countless value choices. the monetary worth assigned to things works the same way. alright, i'm going to try and pay attention...

sitar hero

2008-02-18T19:22:00.000-08:00

i get a huge kick out of that concept. it emerged from a great discussion question posed by my sister: what would you put in your own personal version of guitar hero? our consideration inevitably turned to the beatles, and i lobbied for 'while my guitar gently weeps', but she wrinkled her nose and announced that she would pass on george harrison's stuff. thinking about george a little more, i made the crack about sitar hero. i don't really know what the mechanics would be like; i don't think i've ever seen someone play a sitar, and i know i haven't, despite a couple of consecutive birthday/christmas requests in my misguided youth. i doubt any company is marketing a sitar starter kit through big box stores. perhaps a little too niche. mechanics aside, i also couldn't come up with a big roster for a theoretical game. the small percentage of beatles tunes where george does it, gabby lala playing with les claypool, and the india's greatest hits cd (i wish it was called that, it was like indian masters vol. IV or something, came with a pouch of some black gram lentil dish i ate at work once) are pretty much the limits of my sitar experience. suggestions welcome.
over the weekend i went to delaware (wikipedia pages for states are always great). ostensibly the trip was a beer run, but we wound up traversing the whole state, which sounds impressive, but is not so much when you consider the whole thing is like 100 miles long. in fact, most of the experience was somewhat less than impressive, but it was still pretty cool. i guess my midwest background gears me to expect new states to be notably different in some way. actually the whole terrain reminded me of michigan, if a little more marshy in some spots. mostly the whole place seemed dull and kind of depressing, although i didn't really stop in to check out wilmington or dover. our original destination was supposed to yield discounted alcohol and a chain location of a restaurant called "cluck you". these were to be found in newark, which is militantly pronounced new ark, like some sequel to the noah narrative, to distinguish it from a certain city in the area with the same spelling. anyway, newark is the home of the university of delaware. i am pretty sure i am grateful i did not for any reason choose to attend that school at any point; the town left some things to be desired. i figured the local booze shop would be pretty decent, having a college community to serve. this was not the case. i was so unimpressed by the selection and pricing that i got nothing. also, the alleged cluck you seemed to have vanished. but there was another wing place sharing the parking lot with the liquor store, so we ate there. it was really a pretty nice day if a little chilly, and the driver at some point suggested we just go all the way to the beach.
and so we did, and i got to see plenty of delaware in daylight, although that faded far before we reached our destination. we traversed a strange bridge; i think the wikipedia page calls it the only of its kind. it was a suspension bridge, but instead of having the work on either side, there was just one structure in between the two directions of the highway. its lighting gave it an even more surreal appearance on the drive back. i was in the front seat the whole time, manning the radio. because population is fairly dense in this part of the country, the dial seemed much more saturated than back home, but it still has roughly the same percentage of unlistenable garbage. however, i eventually went painstakingly through the frequencies, finally arriving at 107.9. and it was fantastic. some sort of a community radio station. when we were listening, an elderly man enthusiastically deejayed an assortment of ancient rhythm and blues records, mostly from the early fifties. mostly songs and performers i could not claim to be familiar with, although the music was undeniably an early evolution of so much i have listened to. the deejay's enjoyment of the music was incredibly well conveyed, so much so that i think he could have talked me into appreciating the music if i wasn't already.
as the station began to fade depending on where we wound up stopped in traffic, i noticed a sign proclaiming a prodigiously large liquor store approaching in approximately half a mile. this stop yielded much more fruit than the last. after much perusing and some difficult decisions, i came away with a twelve pack of sierra nevada pale and a six of troeg's nugget nectar for a little over twenty bucks. can't beat that with a stick in my book. i don't need to preach the timeless virtues of sierra nevada pale to anyone here. the nugget nectar, though, demands additional exposition. this is a fantastic beer. i wish i had bought more of it than i did; as i have not had great luck locating it in the city. it proclaims itself to be an imperial amber ale, but at something ludicrous like 93 or so IBUs the malt bill means a little less. i can still detect more and different sweetness on the finish than with even the most aggressive double ipa, but the hops are still what does the talking in this one. beautiful pour and head retention, the lace lingers like the pleasure of consumption itself. the commercial description itself even uses the word 'heady' to describe the hop blend. not a whole lot more need be said.
the beer quest continued, however, as the beach for which we headed was rehoboth beach, home of dogfish head. actually *a* home of dogfish head. although i didn't realize it on the way down, the rehoboth beach location is just an alehouse, in fact one of three in the region. the brewery is somewhere else in the state, and does not have a pub attached. the one i went to is where the distillery is, but it was too late in the day to get to check it out. this was the most initially unsettling microbrewing experience i have ever had. the place was packed out, not in a cozy way, but rather uncomfortable. a lot of money in there. lots of dressed-up food that probably cost a lot more than it should. smelling seafood might always make me think that though. it was damn near impossible to get a beer; the bar didn't have a service area or anything and the bartenders were really busy. the maitre d kept asking us to move one way or another. we weren't trying to be in the way, but in the way was the only way to be. i was about ready to say screw it when my buddy caught the bartender's eye. a fresh draught of ninety minute hit the spot like no other. as it turned out, there was a whole upstairs to the place. it was much more microbrewery appropriate. chilled out, spacious, a couple families, couple guys shooting pool, much quieter. we enjoyed our pints and played a little lord of the rings pinball. i totally won an extra play. then four of the most obnoxious people i have ever had the displeasure to hear disrupted the atmosphere. we finished what little beer we had left and called it good.
then we walked through the rest of the town to the beach. there probably wasn't a whole lot to the town; we were definitely on the main drag. the whole layout and content made me think that this is precisely what saugatuck or grand haven would be if they were on the atlantic instead of lake michigan. lots of nifty-gifty shops, all the perfunctory beach-town type things, few antiques places, lots of restaurants, seasonally empty hotels on the horizon. it was quiet enough that i could hear the ocean getting a louder little by little as we approached. i had never actually managed to see the ocean before, and although it was dark out, i really felt like i accomplished something. it felt good to hear the waves and gaze over the shadowed expanse. we agreed that something endemic to humans makes them like to be near the water.
i wandered away a little bit and stared at the waves slamming into and away from a small jetty. i looked up at the sky, so much clearer than it is with all the light pollution in the city, and i saw a perfect gibbous. some things were incredibly visible and i thought about people navigating the vast sea with only the stars as a guide. i thought about the turn-of-the-sixteenth-century dutch colonists who landed at modern-day lewes, just one town over. theoretically they could have actually arrived right where i stood. i turned around and looked back at the town and reflected that if some benighted seafaring people landed here now they would have to immediately assign some significance to the pizza franchise that somehow occupied each of the two corners where the road to the beach broadened and looped. i thought about american history and its procession over four hundred years and then looked back up at the sky and then turned back to the waves. it felt good to remember how small i am.
i had occasion to revisit that feeling to a lesser degree and in a different way as i took a long walk through the city the other day. i already knew i was in for some walking; i had to make it to my somewhat inconvenient vet to purchase outrageously priced scientifically formulated cat food. however, i did not plan on the subway not running. for some reason i have yet to discover, it was not. the lady in the booth advised me to take the bus. at this point i realized why there had been massive crowds next to the bus stops back above ground. fuck that noise, i thought. so i just walked. i like to do that. it was kind of cold, though, and it snowed a little as my journey progressed. but i saw so many people doing so many different things, and so many businesses of so many kinds in such varying states that i remembered what i like about the city. the city is people, and so am i. from allegedly unoccupied husks of buildings to magnificent homes cannibalizing first floors as garages to venerable specialty stores to a kfc sign promoting their new roasted warp (that's what it said) to hopeful new bars to starkly differing schools, to all the different people i saw at all these different places in between, i felt somehow connected and intrigued.
all of this in turn led me to consider law school in a new way. i realized that at root, the process is an ontological campaign to restrict and otherwise taint my being in the world. it demands a mechanical monofocus, eschewing organic experience and consideration. it is designed to foreclose possibilities and impose a fascist way of being. meaningful engagement is discouraged. but i have to hold myself accountable too. all of this opportunity for reflection and with possibility effervescing around me, yet all i do is find a new way to articulate and explain my distaste for my present circumstances. at least i can say i made it to delaware?

steam punk?

2008-02-14T16:50:00.000-08:00

i was unaware that this was in any way a recognized genre, but a friend of mine lent it to me and noted that it was set in a steam punk universe. i admitted that this meant nothing to me, and the best explanation i could get was well, it is like cyber-punk, but with everything powered by steam. after a bit more description, i remembered watching steam boy, a good film by whoever did spirited away (an even better movie). basically, the idea is to imagine a world where requisite progress has taken place over the last couple hundred years, except electricity has not been harnessed. anyway, the book is called perdido street station, by some jackass who thought it would be cool to call himself china mieville (the first e has an accent over it). the picture inside the jacket does a lot to support the jackass epithet, and the guy who is lending me the book said he would not have purchased it had he seen the dude's photo. it isn't exactly judging a book by its cover, i guess. regardless, i am reading it, and after a slow start things have gotten more interesting. the guy kind of writes like a would-be intellectual who is constantly consulting a thesaurus (and now he is already repeating his obscure words, seventy-odd pages in). the story is gradually becoming more compelling though. if it winds up being really good or really bad i'll let you know. if it turns out to be mediocre, then probably i will not write about it.
i went to a talk at school today. a talk given by an alum who succeeded in his dream of being a sports agent. the vast majority of sports agents are lawyers; most sports require you to be a member of the bar to act as an agent for players in the big league (aka the only way to make money at it). i don't really think i would be a good sports agent, or that i would even want to be one, but i was really curious about what he had to say. the point for me was not that he was a sports agent, so i was pleased that the nuts and bolts of his job didn't dominate what he had to say, although that was sort of interesting too. he mentioned that his job requires him to know a little about a lot of law specialties: people get married and divorce, some 6'6" 330 lb. men want to design home products, sometimes a sense of entitlement leads to crime. the speaker himself was along the lines i imagined. kind of a chach, friendly personality, easy laugh, given to cliches, perhaps not the most successful student of all time. but he was articulate, so much so that he got me to understand why i had shown up, beyond mere curiosity. he was doing something he really wanted to do, and his law degree made it possible, and he does not sit behind a desk at some big firm writing memos and kissing partners' asses. he also brought my problem into sharp relief, even though i think i may have understood it on occasion. he was clear, if you want to have a non-traditional career related to law, you can have it. but you need a vision. you have to know what you want. when you know what you want, you can focus on bringing it about. every effort towards bringing about the exact thing you desire is either a step to making it happen directly or a lesson in how to actually get closer to making it manifest. i know it sounds kind of cheesy and motivational, and he admitted as much, but i really believe it. when a person knows what they want and makes that wish known, the desire is infinitely more likely to be realized. my problem is simply that i do not know what i want. and i knew that going into law school. i should have been able to see that going to professional school knowing only that i did not want to use it for the ends most people would not be real conducive to figuring it out. the experience is different from undergraduate in a lot of ways, but profoundly so in that you really need to know what you want to do when you show up; you can't figure it out in the process, because the process must be guided by that desire. the whole thing is only one year less than undergraduate work, but damned if you don't need to be way more on top of the ball from the get go. on the other hand, i guess i should cut myself some slack. i thought i knew what i wanted when i showed up, and it just didn't take long for me to realize that what i thought i wanted was either not what i thought it was or was simply an untenable desire. on further consideration, maybe those desires aren't entirely untenable, but perhaps i just don't want them bad enough to make them possible. that, and some of my research indicates that a couple of my interests are exclusively served by going to one of the magic fourteen schools at the top of the heap for no other reason than they have been around long enough to build a reputation and draw fat funding. i guess what i'm trying to say is that i have to make a serious decision, and that is probably my least favorite thing to do in the whole world.
aside from all that, my loans have finally gone through. i was pretty excited. i went home from school and got right down to work. thought maybe i'd go to the bar or something. around an hour ago, when i was wrapping things up, i was hit with the sudden realization that today was not just the day that major league pitchers and catchers report. no, school had mercifully failed to beat me over the head with the fact that today is a day of significance in this country. i might have seen things in passing, but my brain was certainly not preoccupied. before i called anyone, though (for the best, i guess), i realized that everyone i would have called is probably busy. i am left feeling more frustrated than lonely. it reminds me of remembering the liquor store (even when not state run) is closed from christmas eve through the 26th after it is too late. the good news is that i can still get booze today, so i am probably going to crack a (shitty) beer (i was going to ask someone who is undoubtedly otherwise occupied to drive to the beer distributor - i ain't carrying a case anywhere anymore tonight) and read this weird book and play some records. things could always be much, much worse. i could be a homeless. and still have to be a law student.
man, one more thing though. here is how today fucked me over again this year. the other night i actually poked around on facebook, mostly out of boredom, partly to look for somebody. i was overwhelmed by the percentage of profile pictures that were either wedding photos or pics of their newborns. a couple were just pictures of the girl's hand with a rock on the right finger. this could be skewed by my background, but still. anyway, i wanted to go on and on about it the next time i posted here. but now i feel like if i do that today, it just seems like i'm bitter and alone, which isn't the case; people identifying themselves in that way bothers me every day of the year. damn you, culture! i guess this self-conscious tirade is amounting to something just as bad. well, whatever. i'm not going to worry about it.
don't forget to vote! we're gonna settle this question once and for all, because there can be no greater authority than a plurality of people who visit this blog.

so much for value in education

2008-02-13T07:34:00.000-08:00

i want to know why the FUCK i am sitting here in class listening to assholes kick around the same old arguments about commodification of the body. and doing a bad job. guess how much i am learning? one thing, and i already knew it: i hate law school and these mediocre motherfuckers in it. they are so goddamned smug it makes me want to spit. do they really believe they are the originators of these arguments? probably, and that is the sad part. and what does this discussion get any of us. can we not think about these issues on our own time? i spent hours preparing for this class yesterday. guess how much it is paying off. this class from the prof who threatened to make it through three assignments today. it isn't that i don't care about the debate about whether people should be able to sell their organs or other parts of their body, it is that i don't see the point in getting involved with a discussion with these people. if there was a good answer to the question, we wouldn't be talking about it. and yet i am surrounded by dozens of people who are pretty sure they have cornered the market on the correct perspective. and good god are they pleased with themselves about it. yeah, i'm pretty unhappy right now.

all embedded in ice

2008-02-12T19:34:00.000-08:00

the city is coated in a surreal half inch of ice. it is really something else. recipe: snow all day, sleet briefly in afternoon, rain for an hour or two in the evening, and finish with a temperature drop. this may have been the most dangerous walk i've ever taken. at one point i slid helplessly toward the road where the sidewalk listed strongly. i tried to walk up to a more even part of the sidewalk, but there was simply not enough traction. i had to lean on a car and make it to the next planter to get back to level ground. i almost fell three or so times. the sensation was not unlike walking on an actual frozen lake: shoes are useless. mostly, it made me wish i was on a real lake with skates, playing hockey. or perhaps stumbling on a canal that freezes once every couple years in the netherlands, preparing to watch a race.
more than anything, the experience put dylan's isis in my head. some of the best imagery i've ever heard: we came to the pyramids, all embedded in ice. overall, one of his premier pieces in my book, judicious use of the fiddle that permeates the whole album, which i am currently enjoying. i had to earn this one, though; couldn't find the fucker for more than ten minutes. i have enough records to demand better organization. one of these days, sure that will happen. add it to the list. on the other hand, it is almost that much more rewarding to hear it when i had to put a little effort in. it's always nice when you know exactly what it is you want to hear and then you get to hear it. music has that level of personal satisfaction nothing else i know of is capable of achieving. something about it is so permanent despite the fleeting timing of the average piece. i still remember her partly feigning partly forgetting, asking me to describe it. some lyrics, some paraphrase, watching her smile grow. it didn't matter whose story it was, just that it was a story i was telling with passion and enthusiasm.
so i had that conference today. the best part about it was when i left i ran into my buddy, who set me up with my all time favorite question: how'd it go? we all know it went alright, dude's car got a little dinged up. i tried really hard to be decent, but i knew i was acting strange. the whole thing just made me so nervous, and i was so angry at her tone that my own tone was one i can affect when i so choose, one mirroring my perception of the way she approached me. not ostensibly unprofessional, yet judgmental and presuming. i nailed her on a couple things, but more importantly i got the information i needed. let me know your vision that i may regurgitate. it was the set 'em up and knock 'em down process i imagined it to be, but i learned from the knockdown. what she characterized as my misunderstandings was confirmed by various classmates as a fairly accurate if not verbatim understanding. ah well, saves her time, generalize a criticism and apply where possibly appropriate. i can't imagine anyone having attended all the classes coming in with what she expected from me. not unless there is some alternative listserve i do not receive.
whatever, flip the record, place the needle, let it ride.
when i was at the worst bar ever the other day, i let myself out for a smoke at one point. such activity rarely goes uninterrupted on cecil b, and this was no exception. the first gentleman who approached me wondered if i would be interested in taking a music survey. why not? i'm perfectly happy to skew your results, sir. the survey was not so much about music in general as it was concerned with christian hip hop, something i know little about. trying to remember what he asked, i can remember questions about my general demographic, from age to income, the general kind of stuff. he asked me how many christian hip hop record labels i could name, and that was not something i could answer with any substance. he also wanted to know how much i spend on cds. that was just as tough to answer; i haven't bought one in a while. the best part was when he showed me his label's logo, which i pretty much liked. royal flow records was the name, stylized crown design. i wondered about including some latin on part of the crest, and our minds met for the only time in the conversation. he really liked the idea, it was something he had contemplated and perhaps argued in favor of with someone else. he seemed pleased at any rate. upon the conclusion of this exchange, another man immediately approached me after witnessing my willingness to cooperate with someone holding a clipboard and a pen. this second man wanted to register me to vote, so i did. he cautioned me regarding my refusal to affiliate myself with a party, explaining it would prohibit my participation in the primaries. if a place wants me to pledge allegiance to have a say in such things, they can kiss my ass. i dislike qualifying as a specifically analyzed demographic, which is easy to avoid as a white male, and i wasn't about to hand over my privilege for this. no worries, it was his job to get people to register, and register i did. i got my confirmation phone call today. apparently this man was working for some community organization, which i do not find surprising. the confirmation had some questions beyond what i had expected, though. they wanted to know if i had my taxes taken care of. they offered to do them for free. they wanted to know if i needed my car fixed, because they would do that for free too. also, did i know anyone whose home had recently been foreclosed upon? because they would willingly assist with that too. sounds like a real top-notch organization. did i want to be a member? no. it is free, though, why not? well, it is a community organization, and i honestly don't feel embedded enough in the community to enjoy these kinds of services. whatever help i might need, there are others who need it more. mostly i'm happy to hear that some body that got people to register to vote also happened to offer assistance with the needs of the average person. very comforting, but i really wondered how it worked on the ground level. more power to them, i guess.
my sister kindly invited me to watch some of the westminster kennel club dog show at her place this evening. dog shows are a good time. the astounding variety of the dogs, the stilted uniformity of the handlers, the striking resemblance of some dogs to their handlers. one of the things that really strikes me about the whole affair is the tradition. they are on something like the 132nd year of this thing. many things in america cannot or will not reach that status, or if they do they are subject to significantly more variation than this event. on the other hand, the club seems to allow more breeds to compete every year, somewhat related to the number of registrations of certain styles. while i was watching it, for some subconscious reason, i had a horrid blink 182 song with altered lyrics running through my mind. i eschewed warped tour for dog show: "i fell in love with the girl at the dog show". there were no women at the dog show i contemplated falling in love with, however. in the immortal words of soren kierkegaard, this we cannot reflect upon.

that'll be enough of that shit

2008-02-11T20:18:00.000-08:00

elvis said that once. the phrase has broad applications, but the instance i know of where he used it was particularly appropriate and compelling: he had just fired a handgun into the screen of a television. it was because robert goulet was on the television, and elvis did not care for robert goulet. i guess here i am referring to that last post (wish i had the balls to say it was in regards to law school; i can think of nothing i would rather metaphorically spray gunfire at for trespassing on the screen of my life), which got a little out of hand. i won't say it won't happen again, because it is fun to type for a long time while drunk and marvel at the relative paucity of errors. i thought about going back and whittling things down today, but it just didn't seem like a worthwhile proposition. it is what it is. leave it there for the record of the interwebs. that was actually the impetus behind those two little posts below it too. i just kind of thought they were worth jotting down and this seemed like as good a place as any for that.
the pressures of the supposed educational process sometimes require a dramatic refocusing of ones thoughts to things more trivial. forces colluded to generate such a feeling for me yesterday. unfortunately, these reprieves are necessarily temporary. band-aid solutions for a viral malady. nothing could bring that fact into sharper relief than my looming conference regarding my brief. it will happen in about thirteen hours, and i am not looking forward to it. i am really trying to bite the bullet and just jump through whatever hoops this prof has dreamed up, but she keeps moving them. also, her commenting fills me with unbridled rage. the tone is the worst, but oftentimes the content is also unclear. i mean, i get what she is saying, but implementation remains a mystery. the biggest reason i dread our meeting tomorrow is that the things i want to ask the most are as spiteful to her as she is to me. the best case scenario is that i couch my questions in respectful inquiries that invite discrete responses. rather than ask her why she keeps telling us to follow examples and that conflict with things she has specifically said, i'll just ask which way is the "right" one. the bad news is that this is mostly what i did last time, and her response is almost invariably a nails-on-chalkboard nervous laugh with the admonition that this is something i will have to work out for myself. all that does is get us back to square one, where i will do what i thought was right, and if she so chooses, it will be right, but more likely she will decide that it is wrong. the arbitrary nature of her response highlights my concern that i am not being taught to write in a legal context, but rather engaged in some sick attempt at imitation of her own horrendously obscured vision. i tried my best to see her advice with eyes unclouded by hate (i think that is from princess mononoke, i like the phrase), but she makes it pretty tough. i literally scream responses when i read what she writes. the form invites reply; almost all she writes is designed as a condescending question. perhaps i will review the results of our one-on-one in this very space tomorrow. i just hate that two adult people who detest each other (i do believe she doesn't like me, personally, and i know how i feel about her) have to go through some charade with no worthwhile results, but i hate more that the charade has a power dynamic featuring me on the low end.
this instance in particular has pushed me back into a state of having extreme difficulty with everything about law school because i can only think about where it is all headed. and mostly i think that where it is headed is not someplace i even want to go, but i don't know how or where to get off and what i will do then. it is like the time i got on the wrong subway and wound up in chinatown. at least that resolved itself well and quickly and only divested me of the price of an additional token while leaving a long since faded bruise on my ego. the point is, when i get like this i spend too much time dicking around and daydreaming about other things i could be doing with my life. today it was graphic data representation. i love that shit, especially when there's a map involved. the downside is that i spent today studying that murder map i've talked about before. not exactly uplifting. the friends i sit next to said i should probably not spend so much time analyzing it, as it was bound to leave me feeling less than inspired. well, it didn't really bring me down, since when you have personal issues that seem important it is more difficult to get worked up about the myriad depressing things in the larger world. or at least that is how it works for me. so i was really no worse off, and i thought about this cool job my sister had analyzing census data. i think i could get down with that. dekkinga, maybe we can work something out and get a map making operation going. wait, why would you want to do something other than you do now? maybe we could do business maps for your job, tell them what microbrews they should get based on distribution in the area any individual store occupies. distribution of booze is a bitch. if i have to be a lawyer maybe i can write distribution contracts and agreements for booze.
we actually just did a case about booze distribution, and it was one of the cases i could actually get into. it came out of michigan law and made it to the supreme court; granholm was one of the prominently featured parties. the problem was whether they could have a law where in-state wineries could ship directly to consumers but out-of-state wineries had to go through the normal distribution process. the problem with the normal wholesaling scheme is that it is prohibitively expensive for smaller operations, which make up a rapidly expanding percentage of american wineries. the majority held that the law was unconstitutional because it functioned as a protectionist measure favoring in-state commerce, which is a violation of congress' power to regulate interstate commerce. the dissent focused on the twenty first amendment, which not only repealed prohibition but seemed to provide a constitutional basis for states having ultimate authority to regulate booze in and coming into their state. fascinating, i know. trust me, it is a hell of a lot better than most of the stuff i get to read.
mostly, what i read makes me wish i had majored in history. there is a lot to know, and i care about a decent chunk of it. going back to get a bachelor's in history would be pretty silly though. don't think it would do a whole lot for the job prospects. but who knows, museums, a place to work? whatever, i'm pretty sure that no matter what i do i am never going to get a decent job. there just aren't enough to go around; every opening attracts dozens of people who have gone to great lengths to be everything that employer wants. most of them probably lie on their resumes. what other blatant dishonesty gets christened with its own more innocent-sounding name? "padding" indeed. this is not something i will ever do. i don't know how large of a role ethics play in that, but i feel like if someone is going to hire me, i want them to hire me for me, and if that isn't good enough, i guess i'll just keep on not having a decent job ever. i want to say that sooner or later people always get found out, but i know that is not true. that asshole from fema sure got his when katrina hit though. i think most people don't get confronted like that though, because experience requirements that engender a lot of bullshit on resumes are based on the perceived necessity of the requirements in the first place. by and large, i think they are irrelevant. a reasonably competent person can probably operate in a lot of fields without having done the exact same fucking thing for five years someplace else or whatever. all this talk had gotten me back to worrying about summer employment. fuck.

sunshine snowstorm

2008-02-10T20:08:00.000-08:00

well, not quite, but it a few flakes floated down on me during some bright daylight today. if nothing else, a thought-provoking contrast, somehow more rarefied than seeing the rain coming down on a sunny day. it did not serve as a springboard to anything deeper or more meaningful. i was in front of the laundromat on the phone, and it mostly represented a magnetic distraction from the conversation at hand, which itself oscillated between the heartfelt and the inane. the real distraction in that setting is the people watching though. every time i do laundry, i bring a book, but i am beginning to suspect that it mostly feeds the illusion that i am otherwise absorbed and not constantly analyzing the happenings and interactions around me. one of my favorite things to do while i stand out front is hold the door for people. on the one hand, it is a nice thing to do, but i am fascinated by the reactions it gets, from the expectantly entitled to the unnecessarily grateful. today while i was doing this a couple kids went in with whomever i held the door for, and the kids seemed to get the biggest kick out of it. one little girl really wanted to hang out; she kept pressing her face to the inside of the glass and waving at me while i stayed outside for a while, and then, much to her mothers chagrin, came to stand on the porch and show me her dora the explorer gloves. kids are something else man, but i always run into a few when i'm doing laundry, usually a few with some questions. the best, and i may have typed this back when it happened, was the two little brothers who were convinced i worked at trader joe's. at least i assume they were convinced, because they remained unconvinced of the opposite despite my unwavering position that no, in fact i did not work there.
but come on, have i really done nothing but laundry since i posted last? thankfully, no, although the detailed description of the week's activities is typically law school laden. had a chunk of a brief draft due, and that sucked up some hours, as many obsessing and planning as actually typing. no fun at all. and this week i will have my conference with the prof to talk about it. i tried to do it the way she wants, but past experience has consistently proven that doing things the way she has advised inevitably leads to the most criticism. every time we "learn" how to do something, the next class we have is dedicated to telling us we did it wrong, and fraught with contradictory instructions about how things should actually look. the sad part is that the more i go through it, the more i realize that she is not so much teaching us to write in a way consistent with legal practice as she is teaching us (after requisite setting us up to knock us down) how she, personally, would write the assignment. i'm sure her formulation is acceptable, but i resent being graded on imitation over function. also, the persecution of the passive voice serves to make writing more boring, not more clear. if you're so stupid that you can't handle passive voice, go fuck yourself, and give me your gavel and robe. i'm miles of experience and credibility from a courtroom, but the fact that judges serve as a justification for the inanity of legal writing fills me with derision for them. the only good news about all this is that review conferences are preempting class tomorrow morning, so i get to stay up late and write this and then sleep in.
los gatos are running around and making crazy noises. i do not know what they want. probably food. unfortunately, i've recently discovered that if i put food out when they agitate for it, one of them always eats too much too fast and pukes some of it up, which is no fun for anyone. the other day i learned that shakespere invented the word puked. pretty far out. in fact, there was a fairly cool list of like eight or so words and phrases that the bard imparted to the language that today seem pretty indispensable. however, the list was on cracked.com, and i refuse to link them, cause most of their shit is pretty weak. on the other hand, what is the harm in linking one list? just know that i do not endorse this site. this is one of the rare instances where one of their arbitrarily numbered lists is rooted more in opinion than fact. also, it turns out this was actually a list of ten, and i really think people should read it, and the direct link satisfies the inherent laziness of any internet denizen. i feel like i'm twice as likely to click hypertext (not marked, appropriately enough) and get somewhere than i am to take the painless step of opening a new tab and doing a quick google (wonder how long before that one doesn't get marked) for whatever it was. easy, quick, reliable, but yet somehow not the instant gratification that makes the web the wonder it is today.
on friday i spent some time and too much money at two bars i know. one of them is my least favorite bar i am familiar with, and the other is maybe my favorite bar, perhaps because i am most familiar with it, along with its proximity, pricing, and lax (read: nonexistent to the point of still putting ashtrays out for everyone) enforcement of the city's smoking ban. for my least favorite bar that i know, i am resolved to never ever ever go back again, even though i managed to not pay for one of my beers (least they could do after they charged me five dollars for a blue moon that was just as flat and skunky as the rest of the tap). as close as it is to school, there is another bar on campus that is a little cheaper, has a way better tap, and doesn't constantly play music that makes me think i'm back at work at the plasma place. as for my preferred dive, the mill creek tavern, i decided i should stop by their web page more often to determine the odd dates where they have music that doesn't completely blow, and perhaps arrive before they start overcharging for cover. it was worth it this time though. not only was it my buddy's birthday, but the bands were a contrast to the dull grind metal and off-key punk bands eligible for rhythmic welfare they typically feature at the establishment. one band sounded a lot like primus; bass heavy in the mix at the wheel of a sonic bus with psychedelic keyboard renderings to add a unique flavor. another one sounded like a proggy jam outfit guided by bjork's twin's vocal stylings. the third band was the best of the bunch and was somewhere between these two idioms. on the downside, i'm pretty sure it was a four-piece that billed itself as sea trio. was that seriously the hippest thing you could come up with? we have four people and call ourselves a trio? in any event, they were thoroughly decent, but the primus-inspired band was probably the most fun to see in my book. i'm not really sure what any of them were called; i knew the four names on the bill, but i missed one band and at least two of the three i saw never announced themselves. two of the names were pretty quality though, voodoo economics (bueller? anyone?) and bear is driving, which i imagine was inspired from a clerks animated series episode. if you are unfamiliar, well, i wish i could tell you how to avail yourself, because the reference is the most pure stroke of genius in the whole series. i thought about trying to describe how it goes down, but it really isn't nearly as funny unless you see it. the only way i know how to see it is stealing the dvds from an old roommate, but netflix might work too. for some reason, netflix is the top ad link for valentine's day on my internet service login page, closely followed by 'find a new job'. i love it when internet advertising makes little to no sense. the other ones are all related to flowers. the only good news is that no specific link to heart shaped jewelry made it.
i had a brief conversation with one of my neighbors the other day; one of the strangest exchanges i have ever been party too. this was the nice lady who lent me the carrier to take straw to the doctor (damn cat couldn't even get himself some insurance, we're going to canada). let me preface this by saying i have only knocked on her door once, when i was borrowing the carrier, and i have never come close to going all kramer and just bursting in or anything. so i'm coming up the stairs to my door, probably loud as hell, with my thick-soled shoes and heavy gait, and i hear "hello? hello?" and she says my name, so i'm like "hello?". odd, but makes enough sense. then she starts apologizing profusely, and i confusedly reply that it's okay, whatever it may be. she pleads with me not to come in, apologizing agian and explaining that i should refrain from entering because she is extremely exhausted from packing to move. i try and assure her that this is alright, not mentioning the fact that i had no intention of entering, kind of like the other hundred-odd times i've come home. i do not have anything profound to say about the exchange, nor do i find any metaphorical significance in the event, but i still think it was one of the strangest conversations i have ever had, and for some reason i have felt a need to share it since it happened. now i have.
jack just jumped on me and the keyboard, and somehow opened outlook express and almost made it some sort of a default, which it probably already is, considering a cat jumping on a keyboard caused it to launch. i should have let the cat's contributions to that memo draft i turned in stay in. the conference would have been a bit more interesting: so, why did you include this long string of the letter b? well, not only did it sponsor today's sesame street, which taught me more than you ever will, and my cat thought it was a really valuable and persuasive contribution. you don't think the judge will be convinced? well, just wait 'til he sees my cat. this is the prettiest, littlest cat of all time, you see. i really don't think the opposition will be able to respond or recover from this devastating illumination of the evidence. the analysis is really top-notch.
the other day i was thinking about how to best improve my situation in regards to the institution that has somehow become my nemesis (higher education? you don't remember me? we used to party and get along so well!) and i made a list of habits/vices in an attempt to gauge their effect. one that made it on that i don't usually think about was sodium. man, i cannot get by without something crunchy and salty when i'm trying to really get down to business working on something. but then i thought about it a little more and checked some shit out, and damn, for someone who never ever picks up a salt shaker, i have way too much intake of that shit. i probably can't let go, but i find it odd how that habit plays a role in my activity and finances. with that reflection in mind, i went to the grocery store making sure i at least didn't get potato chips, because sodium is bad enough without fat. so i went with pretzels, even though they bring me back to the days where my schedule was wake up at noon, eat a peanut butter sandwich and read a book, go to work, eat nothing and smoke at least seven cigarettes during an hour's worth of break time, go home, eat pretzels, drink four dollar deuces of steel reserve until i couldn't read, and try and find my missing cat by wandering around drunk and meowing. all that aside, i have discovered the best form of pretzel. they come in an astounding variety of what is essentially the same thing: extruded dough in a strange shape covered in salt. how much can the shape matter? a lot. the experience of eating anything is related to how compact the item is, especially true for something crunchy. the best pretzel shape is... the whieel. closely related in compactness to the mini or tiny twist, these are circles with five spokes, and something about them is far superior to the little twists, my previous preference. man, this is a long meditation on pretzels. am i so white that i revert to seinfeld-style humor at certain junctures? could be. in fact, the packaging of the wheel pretzels offers an unnecessarily lengthy meditation on dippers versus non-dippers of pretzels and the application of the instant pretzel incarnation to that activity. no dipping here, but just as engaged. whatever. i've got some new dip, and i'm gettin' whippets. i've got a new hip, and i'm gettin' rickets?
enough of that silliness. getting down to some serious business, i'm playing abbey road. i'm on side two right now, and in the middle of some deeply-felt personal conflict. i fancy myself a john man, and in fact when i put on the record i looked at the sleeve and recalled a detailed discussion of the appearance of each member of the band that i hijacked to obsess over how fucking cool john looks, and how that would make sense because of how cool he actually is. the point here is that i'm on side two, the paul side, and damn am i a sucker for it. abbey road is immaculate, but side one is all john, but not the best of john. the other side is really probably as good as paul gets, but it is just so together. i know it is paul's show for this part of the album and i feel like it is somehow not as credible, but i just love it. the diversity, the flow, that mini rock opera attempt. i think that is what really does it; paul takes the implicit and shoves it in your face, being like so, this is what is up, i don't care if you dig it because it hangs together on its own. and of course he couldn't give it its own light (viz. wings) but these guys could do the rest for him.
speaking of wings, they're bollocksing it up all over the place, typical of them to lose to two of the worst teams in the league, but today against the ducks was unforgivable, if not that than at least unspeakably frustrating. SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM WINDOW. sorry. hockey and all, i know you all care a lot about that. to those non-sporting types, i say that the need for a meaningless distraction has become unavoidable and downright indispensable in these times. we all like to think that we have some value-less proxy we can use as a silo for so many emotions we have no opportunity to express in fullness within the friendly confines of our daily dealings, but i find sport to be a vast and welcome repository for these things. a lot of us like the underdog (pleasantly unmarked, curious about the etymology, ironically willing to bet on history rooted in actual dog fights), but forget the giants, city beat united in the manchester derby today. no championship of any kind was involved, but i really wish there was a way to measure how many people gave a fuck about this regular season premiership contest between two historical rivals compared to those who watched the super bowl with a vested interest the other week. the beautiful game has global appeal. i would also like to know how much money changed hands for each event. a few people probably garnered some good cash in both cases. i would almost be willing to bet that on the bookie's level today was more of a shock than a week ago. tough to say though, i am no odds maker, although that is an occupation i would be interested in learning more about.
odds makers are also still projecting hillary for this year's overall election. goes to show you what they know. data over instinct, every time. who knows how it will shake down in the end? not me. although i almost wish it was. i think it would be pretty cool to be involved with that sort of thing, whether i was the boy changing the numbers on some big board display, or the shady character making the books, or a politics addict sweating over the larger meaning while still maintaining a rigorous gambling habit. i find economics more intriguing by the day, but there ain't no economics like black-market economics 'cuz black-market economics don't stop? no, they're the best because they are more tapped into the real people with day-to-day worries and cares and addictions. they offer a more accurate and meaningful portrait of the populace. i wonder how much academic study is devoted to those sorts of things. maybe not enough. maybe that is my niche. maybe not. maybe i need to grab another undergraduate degree. maybe that would be a waste of money. maybe i'd learn twice as much at half the price. i can't say for sure, but i bet there is a way to bet on it. i hope so anyway.
these days are still troublesome to me, and occasionally i deal with it better than other times. i guess that is a fairly vacuous (whoa, spelling) statement; mostly the story of everyone's life given a minimum of introspection. for me, i was not dealing real well this past week. too much drinking to cope, which is sad. drinking should be a celebration and communal and rewarding, not a psychological mechanism. so skews the supremacy of "schooling". i felt pretty good about it at the time, however. the good man at the restaurant and beer provider across the street sent someone to procure my omnipresent order of two pbr forties. a young man who looked exactly like someone i knew in the sense that i knew who they were in terms of what they did, but not as a human being, was talking to the guy running the show about some pamphlets he had. i was casually observing the dude, but became a little more intrigued when the man behind the counter smiled and accepted the stack of proffered booklets. turned out they were issues of some sort of poetic compilation. when my beers arrived, the man/manager enthusiastically informed me i was free to take one, free of charge (i don't think anyone was paying, but he was happy to tell me i could have it). i took it home with the beer, and decided to try and pair them in experience as they held together in acquisition. worked out rather well. the booklet was something called the idiom. i found it to be rather engaging and the content to be surprisingly by-and-large worthwhile. i immediately thought of my preferred originator of grotesque parody, who produces work in keeping with but notably superior to things of this nature. actually, a lot of the content was in the same league, a lot better than i expected it to be, with an excellent variety and some strikingly compelling imagery. a few heavy hitters in the tangible paper product. however, the progenitor of some content was named as this blog, which contains an inordinate amount of drivel compared with the publication i received. this mostly serves the notion that whoever is editing knows what they are up to, and i find that comforting. many contributors have credentials beyond 'some people i know let me post poems i wrote on their semi-obscure generic blog location'. all this being said, i feel that the above-mentioned originator wouldn't be out of place in something like this, and need only follow previous linkage to find his place in it all should he so desire. it would be good to see, because i was pretty sure that the poetry that flooded my mental space after drinking copious amounts of cheap beer and reading the more base offerings constituted a comparable product. this was something i could do, but even if i could do it as adequately as some of the more amateurish participants, i wouldn't have the feeling and conviction they do. bravo, i say. even if i think you are shitty at what you do, at least you love doing it so much that you seek to identify yourself as someone who does these sorts of things. if you do these things well, and come from outside the established milieu, you should be justly embraced. c'mon peter, didn't you always used to say you wished you could be published in a rag serving as backup toilet paper in the dingy bars of central jersey? i could have sworn that was your catchphrase. but i hope people do check this out. a digestible regional phenomenon, if nothing else.
in fact, because i don't think much of my readership, vast and diverse though you may be (yeah, right), cannot acquire the fairly respectable physical product, i would like to relate a couple of things. no, i am not going to get written permission about it. stepping on the little guy, that is how i roll. until it becomes my job to defend them in copyright litigation, anyway. at this point, i think these folks would probably be satisfied that i link some shit from the post at least. so, people may have already heard of this first thing, but i hadn't, and i think it is pretty cool. this guy daniel zimmerman invented a poetry form called isotopes (i feel like i've seen the text for the link elsewhere; i could be wrong). the way it works is that you start with a word square, a four by four grid of letters that make words if you read it left to right and up to down, like this (except lined up way better so as you can actually see the words)
TIME
IDOL
DENS
EASE
the dude plugs them into this anagram server to get lines to make poems out of. pretty nifty. the guy's listing in the rag is pretty legitimate; i guess one can still make a name for oneself as a poet of sorts after a fashion these days. i find that comforting.
the other thing from this publication i wanted to highlight was a well-told story. in fact, i'm just going to reproduce it here, word for word, because i can and i feel like it. the dude shows up in the publication as HeMightBeWalter, which is probably what he uses on that blog i referred to earlier, but you can check him out in depth here, and this is what he wrote that made it in, with my own interjections in the brackets:
I feel the need to warn you all. Warn you about a crazy new fab [sic, i think he meant fad, so much for me giving props to the editor] sweeping the greater Ocean Count area. Pube Jointing. Iknow what you are thing, so stop it. This is Serious!!!

The event that followed [sic again, c'mon people] are all true. The names and locations have been change to protect the innocent.

While attending a small get together at John and Jade's apartment, Samantha had found that she had run out of cigarettes [jesus, learn tense!]. She began trying to "Bum a smoke" from one of the many smokers in attendance. After many a failed attempt, her friend Arthur made mention of an abandoned pack of Camel Menthol Lights on a bookcase. One shake assured her that the pack was empty, but Arthur, under further inspection, found that is [it? this is not tricky people] was in fact not completely empty.

When Arthur opened the pack of cigarettes, he found only two things inside, both resembling cigarettes. Then, Arthur did a double take, realizing that one of the was not exactly a cigarette. More like a "Marijuana cigarette". He pulled it out of the pack. Everyone was excited, especially Samantha, who only expected the pack to be empty [you couldn't write anything better than a regurgitation of previous prose that was already the moral equivalent of beige?]. But something just wasn't right. After a light squeeze, Arthur decided it wasn't the right consistancy [yup, they published that misspelling] that it should be. Something was inside the tightly twisted up paper, but it was not "The Chronic".

To everyones [yeah, no possessive apostrophe] dismay (and to somes [again, this is just sloppy and not artsy] disbelief), Arthur began to rip open the "Joint". As he had suspected, what was inside was not green and fluffy, rather dark brown and curly. He had found hair of the Pubic [make sure to capitalize that] variety. They had been Pube Jointed. Someone had likely shaved their most private of areas and saved the clippings, in hopes of playing the cruelest of practical jokes on some unsuspecting party goers.

This is very serious. It could happen to anyone. Your parents. Your little sister. The guy at the supermarket who cuts your sandwich meats [on further reflection, this is the most likely victim]. It could even happen to you [dude should have bolded and all-capsed that]. Please, before you get "High" inspect your "Doobies". Or else you may wind up smoking on someones Pubies.

So that was the story they included in the publication. It is not a bad or unfunny story to hear, and it could have been told worse. mostly, i am glad that the story is from jersey. i don't really have a lot of first-hand experience with that state, but here, in order to qualify as a resident of the city, i have to make fun of it. if you don't make fun of it, they think you are from there, and will tell you to go back. i am not from there, and i do not want to go there. so i will post this funny story from someone who is from there and felt it necessary to relate an amusing anecdote. whoever he is, he made me laugh, and i hope you appreciated it too. you know what doesn't make me laugh? knocking over all of my peanuts and a bunch of books. this is, of course, what just happened. that is correct, it happened. this contrasts to the notion that it was something that i did or an event in which i was the prime mover. no, nothing like it. this was an unfortunate event tat happened to me wherein i am an innocent.
as always, context is key. right now, i am enjoying a microcosm of that truism. playing an 87 phish show compressed to 128 kbps mp3 (mp3 not marked, kbps is). if i was listening to a show of this quality on a cassette tape no one would complain, in fact, it would probably considered fairly correct. but the fact that i acquired it via download implies that a lossless transfer exists. regardless, it is a fine historical artifact available here. man were they ever a different band then than they were 11 or 12 years later when they would play sets of five or six songs, the majority extending over fifteen minutes. i'm just happy that casual browsing allowed me to acquire some 92 to 94 material (look for 92 st. mike's); truly the golden era of a band that was always trying to hit stride and never knew when it did. that is the strongest parallel between them and the dead, no matter what the savants impugn. all i'm saying is that quinn the eskimo gets here, everybody's gonna wanna dose (gonna and wanna are cool with spell check). phish at hunt's or nectar's makes me think about the back forty at billy's. that band will probably never go anywhere, owing to the members' day jobs more than their musical abilities, but somehow they've outgrown the confines and context i appreciated the most. i think i kind of understand those vermont dickheads who think they have a monopoly on appreciation of a band. back forty at billy's is something i miss as much as having a car and bottle deposits; i can't care anymore but there is a permanent place in my heart for the way i imagine things were, regardless of how addled i willfully render my recollections. what do you know about set break? eleven one oh six, that's all i can tell you if you weren't there.
as long as we're on the topic of nuanced jam band aficionado-ship, i would like to make a confession: i have been listening to and appreciating one of the few dead tunes i have sworn allegiance against. el paso. it is an easy and simple tune, nothing too far from mexicali blues or more accurately me and my uncle, neither of which i've actively crusaded against, although i do have some beef with mexicali. the point is, anyone who knows dead right now is thinking i have lost it. that may be the case. this is like saying victim or the crime was a good song. and hey man, it actually was when brent got in on it big time. so yeah, i've even exceeded the bounds of settled good taste according to deadheads (not marked - sweet!). one time, bobby sang the opening lyric as "patience runs out on the bunny" instead of junkie. the more you know...
i wish i could tel you this post was brought to you by the letter k and the number four, but all i have is the the letters pbr and the phrase 'elevated prime did edit her'. take what you can get sometimes, you know? jij ken? alright, i think i've had enough if you haven't. getting plenty of extreme at this juncture, willing to call it scooters, vacation, fall, and a night at that.

subtitle (unrelated)

2008-02-09T20:52:00.000-08:00

an unflattering tale of raw humanity

maxim

2008-02-09T19:24:00.000-08:00

specialization means we know more and understand less

you say you want a revolution...

2008-02-04T18:27:00.000-08:00

i think i'll take number nine (beatles or magic hat) instead of whatever was going on yesterday. instead of going for some super bowl festivities (oops) i decided to go to what was billed as a talk at this place. i didn't think it was going to take all that long; figured i would go and walk over to the party for the second half of the game. the event was a prominent figure from an organization called copwatch L.A.. i guess a few western cities have groups like this, the idea is that they keep an eye on what the cops do and how they treat people and document their unfair actions. sounds pretty cool on face, and i was really interested because it had occurred to me while i was doing legal observing that the cops do a lot of shitty things outside of protests. i also just kind of wanted to see what the place was like and who showed up and how things went down; my nature is to observe a happening as much as to attend. well, i had plenty of time to gauge, as the speaker didn't make it until like almost forty five minutes past when things were allegedly going to get rolling. the room was alright, long and narrow, with quite a commendable library for an organization of that stripe. mostly the sort of things one would expect, left-leaning literature, a well-stocked pamphlet rack, but lots of real books and a surprising variety of fiction and non-documentary films. i killed a lot of time browsing a deleuze book i hadn't encountered before, sort of a chance to expound on anti-oedipus. most of the people who showed up were white and looked like most of the social justice people i've encountered. presumably to break down the power structure of presentation, the seats were rearranged into a large semi-circle for things to actually start going down. for whatever reason, we went all the way around introducing ourselves and describing what we were affiliated with/why we were at the thing, which mostly proved to be an opportunity for people to drop names and spew acronyms. the end result of the setup was that a lot of people talked a lot about their personal views and experiences, which i did not find to be real illuminating or helpful, as much of the talk had some self-congratulatory tone. not as much of that as there was rhetoric though; an awful lot of generalization and what i guess could be called term-dropping (fill-in-the-blank/industrial complex, including "non-profit/industrial complex"). the talk quickly turned to a prolonged discussion/argument of gentrification, which was not really what i showed up to listen to, but one of the more articulate and thoughtful participants drew a respectable connection which devolved into some pretty rude and pointless crap. overall, there were some bright spots, but the "dialog" was mostly dominated by a lot of unsupported claims everyone wanted to believe and no one wanted to provide evidence for. i don't doubt the things people said, but i would really appreciate documentation. which is what i thought things would be a little more concerned with. only about half an hour of what turned out to be a nearly three hour ordeal really dealt with the ins and outs of what the copwatch group did. a good chunk of the people spent a lot of the time looking bored and uncomfortable, and a few people spoke more than was necessary. overall, it was kind of depressing. how these people intend to get the world to agree with them and fundamentally change surprise while they can't act right in a group of thirty-odd bodies supposedly gathered for a common concern is beyond me. suffice to say that i did not leave feeling real inspired. i had kind of hoped that the whole thing would make for some better blogging material, but the more i go on the more i realize that i couldn't even glean a whole ton for that purpose. ah well, you don't know if you don't go. hey, i got out on the weekend. i guess going to a super bowl thing would have counted too, though. gone are the days of reserved seats at the bar proper on said sunday, with requisite breaks for private truly super bowl celebrations.
on the other hand, i did make it out on saturday as well. way out, in fact, about an hour's train ride to the northern burbs. i brewed some with a classmate and her husband, some really good people, and there's a lot to be said for that. got to hang out with some dogs, too, another bonus. i really enjoy riding on trains, but this particular route was one i didn't need to see twice. i don't know if parts of the area are really that shitty, or if whatever is next to the railway is bound to take a dive for some reason, but the view was mostly a downer. however, there was some surprising changes along the way: a forested area would suddenly pop up, or xeroxed undersized family homes would yield to hospital-esque apartments or palatial estates. when i finally got where i was headed, the whole town came off as a little bizarre because it was very old and yet distinctively a suburb. back home, certain areas are of comparable age, but they spent a large portion of their history in a distinct format of farmland, whereas this had always been a respectably sized suburb, albeit also couched among what had traditionally been agricultural enterprise. brewing itself came back like riding a bike, even more simple than i had remembered, but i didn't really get to do a whole lot. the dude goes all-grain, and we had a scare with the runoff, but a tactic i've long espoused proved to solve whatever the problem was: just let it sit and see if it fixes itself. it did. in the intervening time, i was introduced to venture brothers, an occasional adult swim feature. it was quite strange and satisfyingly amusing. they fed me some solid food as well, the dude has some respectable cooking chops. in fact, chops is what he made, and some solid mashed potatoes, all rosemary and garlic. those kitchen aid mixers are capable of some badass shit. they lent me a book to read on the way back on the train in the dark, freakonomics, which i was glad to finally get a crack at. i blazed through it with the quickness, closed up within twelve hours of lending. anyone who was gonna read it probably has, so i don't have to tell you to. some of the arguments i felt were better than others, and i was really surprised at how intuitive the whole thing seemed to me, given the out-there connotation the authors try to give the theories. maybe i missed my calling. wait, i definitely did, i just don't know what it was supposed to be. not pop economics, even if i knew where they were going and what the argument was going to be a decent portion of the time.
so i tried to make the most of the weekend for once, and it had its ups and downs, but i was back to business today. in the middle of one of my classes, my buddy who sits next to me straight up started to lose his shit. i don't know how he wound up there, but he was tickled by the notion of bacon salt. as was i, as was i. i feel like someone i know mentioned the product to someone else recently, so i'm not claiming first discovery, but if the rest of y'all (not marked! also, i discovered that spell check does not mark irregardless. what gives?) have not been alerted, let this serve. it really is sort of outrageous. check out the blog, with links to a disturbing variety of cocktails calling for the product. on the other hand, the bacon chocolate turned out pretty good; better than it sounded at least. i don't know if everything should taste like bacon, but it is pretty amusing to read the thoughts of those who do think so.
the other strange product of the day is a nicotine vaporizer. a guy i know at school was pretty psyched to get his, and has been making liberal use of it inside buildings whenever he has the opportunity. no one has said anything yet, as there is no smell and the whole apparatus sort of resembles a pen. the way it works is that there is a nicotine solution, and the head is enough to vaporize the liquid, so you still sort of feel like you're inhaling smoke, but it is not as hot, and also there is no tar, leading to a somewhat less satisfying feeling. but the nicotine is all there, i guess. they're big in europe and parts of asia where smoking is popular but recently strictly regulated. at any rate, the dude i know has been getting away with it with no hassle thus far. i mean, what are people going to say, anyway? there is no odor, and so nobody even really notices. indoors, there is no visible vapor upon exhale, and a trivial amount results from the puff, but it quickly dissipates and like i said, no one can smell it, because it is more or less steam. i don't think i will be quickly converted, but i guess it works for this guy, who was one of the biggest chain smokers i have ever met in my life. however, he is also the sort of person who gets such a big kick out of being able to get his nicotine in a semi-smoked format in areas where tobacco use is prohibited. on the one hand, i wanna be like more power to him, but on the other hand, it is one of those strange and perplexing features of our present era.
well, originally this post was going to have a whole lot more about that meeting at lava and what power means and how it functions in society, but i think this is for the best. i guess the point after much deliberation was going to be that tearing down structures of power inevitably creates a vacuum which is in turn filled by one person or another, and that is why the change people envision is pretty unlikely. history bears witness alongside the microcosm of a roomful of "progressive" folks. go ahead and tell me i'm looking for an excuse to legitimize structures that favor me, and i will tell you that those structures intrinsically favor me to agree but also require me to compromise the culture i envision. power makes rules, and people are more or less left to decide whether they will legitimate power by accepting the rules and ascending via being co-opted or attempt to replace those structures with something else that will inevitably lead to it's own injustices. i am left wanting an historical contradiction, and nothing leaps to my mind. i am loathe to capitulate to nature and genetics, but there is some compelling evidence to suggest a large part of the way people act is predetermined to some degree, and that means there will always be someone to take advantage of a vacuum. at this point i would like to willfully misinterpret that to envision someone sexually abusing a vacuum cleaner. i'll leave you all with that.

took the long road home

2008-01-30T19:46:00.001-08:00

i never considered my new digs to be a move to the tropics, and hey, it is not. but on the other hand, i cannot recall the last time i voluntarily took a thirty-odd block walk in january. i don't have any reference as to whether this is a mild winter for the city; i guess i could ask around. but there has not really been anything i would classify as a proper snowfall. i did miss a few weeks in the middle of winter though, and didn't really bother to check and see what the weather was like while i was not around. the point is that the walk, as usual, was a good thing. really helped to clear the head. i was in a pretty foul mood leaving school today.
things started out with me walking into a rumor mill dedicated solely to producing the single rumor (very specialized operation, you see) that our only class today was canceled. while i find it annoying to hear people toss around any idea that has no basis i am aware of, this goes double when i am unshakably certain that there is no basis. no email, no sign on the classroom door, nothing. to make matters worse, a full four people who never talk to me stopped to ask if i had heard class was canceled, 'cause, you know, they heard it from somebody, and heard some other people talking about it. after the fourth one the only thing that could have pissed me off more was if they had against all odds been correct. fortunately, they were not. unfortunately, i had spent a good amount of time yesterday preparing the three cases for today, and we spent the first third of class on a case i thought we had wrapped up at the previous session, and the rest of the time went towards considering only the first of the three assigned for today, approached in a way inconsistent with and unrewarding towards how i had studied the case for the most part. also, about halfway through, i noticed that a large portion of the class was all dressed up "professional" like. big interview day today! the overheard sentiment was that if you didn't have your ducks in a row and your panties in a bunch today, you're just shit out of luck, because this is the one day where anyone who is going to get a good job for the summer is going to start down that road. kiss my fucking ass, my only regret is that i didn't bring a bottle of shiraz to placate me and spill on your $800 suit. have i mentioned my distaste for my peers? two of them who also don't normally speak to me stopped by to express their frustration that their unofficial transcripts did not yet bear demarcation indicating their distinguished class participation. what ever will they do if they don't have it when every law firm within ten miles from their home interviews them? they did, after all, compile a list and mail a career services-approved resume to each and every one of them. i would really hate to see their rampant douchebaggery go unrewarded. a friend and i conferred and decided that if we were hiring associates, we would see their note and be fully aware that they were one of THOSE PEOPLE who can't shut the fuck up and emits a cloud of smug every time they speak, whether they are making an irrelevant and asinine contribution or answering the boringly obvious questions we're subjected to on a daily basis, and thus not hire them. the thing is, the kind of people who get to be in charge of hiring at law firms are probably were the exact same motherfucker when they were in law school, and are thrilled to take in an eager protege. after all, the only real purpose law school grades (and thus the majority of the entire process of "legal education" itself) serve is to identify the people who are most willing to ask how high when told to jump, the sort who will unquestioningly eat sleep and breathe whatever they are told to do. and honestly, they'll fit in the best at the big firm with the fat salary. have fun with your mercedes and your meaningless lifetime. the world is a better place now that you swung that contract between those two multinational corporations, i know i was hoping the rich could maybe get a little richer. usually i try not to throw around generalizations and take on a fuck you you're so corporate attitude, because the world is a nuanced place, but sitting here knowing that my life will be just fine and i have tons of options while i watch all these other people scurry around trying to find all the right hoops and jump through them gracelessly fills me with nothing but disgust and derision, because i have a front row seat. i bear witness toward something more mindless than watching last night's episode of a network sitcom on a cell phone in an escalade stuck in highway traffic while sipping starbucks listening to top forty on a speaker system as underutilized as marvin in hitch hiker's. so yeah, i kind of didn't mind the walk. it was sunny, if a little brisk.
the walk was actually was precipitated by the sacrifice of my free transfer to go get coffee with a compatriot i don't spend enough time with (due in some part to my apprehension about getting to where she lives - shady south philly). she and i had a pretty good talk, and her approach to things is really inspiring. i find it immensely comforting that someone who always seems to be pretty with it in class and leads a pretty righteous and socially responsible lifestyle (she does a lot for food not bombs, and is generally what i would call a good person) hasn't made any more inroads into the employment bullshit than i have, but has tons of ideas about what to do instead. she also shares my deep-seated distaste for the public interest clique and their insufferable self-righteousness in spite of their palpable lack of results. they just congratulate themselves and each other for not making a bunch of money while doing something nominally responsible. neither she nor i know how we're going to work any of this crap out, but i walked away feeling like hey, fuck 'em. no one but you can stop you from doing what you want to do about it. that just leaves a personal translation to be desired, but step one was knowing that it was possible.
so, other than law school, oh wait, i spent all day on it. the nice thing about this semester is that things are mostly more discrete and concrete. criminal law was impossible to pin down, despite being well-taught. it is subject to innumerable mutations across state lines and over time. torts was hopelessly bad, owing to materials and really lousy teaching. contracts was the only thing that really went well, because of defined focus and an atmosphere lacking the abject terror that permeated the criminal classroom. now, constitutional law has a direct reference point for everything, property is incredibly integrated, ip is covering something i care about, and civ pro at least, well, that kind of sucks i guess, but we'll see where it goes. the only enduring thorn in my side is legal writing. prof is an asshole, always setting you up to knock you down (two drafts in: okay, here's what you people SHOULD be doing, nevermind what i told you was right before) , just plain rude and unhelpful at turns, and focused more than anything else on the elephant in the room of my life known as "real job". the most annoying aspect is that it is all being filtered through what one unproven commodity (my so-called educator) thinks it should mean. she's not exactly a published authority on the subject, but that does not prevent her from exerting a lasting impact on students' perceptions and prospects. the whole crapshoot is easily revealed by talking to people with other profs. although, at the end of the day, i guess no one is really going to be able to give an acceptable justification for things being the way they are in legal practice. why do we do it this way? tradition. why should we follow tradition? it is what judges expect. why do they expect it? that is the way they learned it; the way it has been done before, also called tradition. i want to call it a tautology, but i guess the extra step just makes it circular. but i guess my response is just as bad: don't go to law school. why? it sucks and is a giant crock of shit. why? because it is law school. the difference is that what i have to say is helpful in some way. if you were thinking about law school. cause i know you were, given the glowing endorsements you've read here. it is cheaper and just as effective to get trashed at your favorite watering hole and telling people to go fuck themselves without knowing why you're advising such a course of action.
i'm sorry if you read this. it was kind of self-indulgent, but it was all i had, and i wanted to write something to keep me occupied. what is a blog if not an opportunity for venting and distraction?