No More Secrets?

William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and many other sci-fi classics (including Idoru, which I'm currently reading), wrote a fascinating yet odd little essay last week in the NYT. In "Road to Oceana" [link via Scripting News], Gibson looks back at George Orwell's 1984 and argues that its dystopic world was based on a now outdated paradigm. Whereas Orwell was afraid of the power broadcast media could give fascist governments to brainwash and control their populace, Gibson says today we've moved beyond broadcast to virtual media via the internet. This means that we no longer need to fear the propagandistic power of broadcast media, or even so much the surveilling power of government- or corporate-controlled networks of cameras. According to Gibson, we need not fear these things because information is now hyperlinked and massively ubiquitous, with the end result being that "It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret."

Gibson's track record as an almost prophetic visionary is incredible, so I'm reluctant to disagree with his conclusion. Still, I'm skeptical. For example, the Bush administration has come up with the "military tribunal" and the status of the "enemy combatant" as new and improved ways to throw a thick blanket of secrecy over important government and military actions, not to mention the many Bush executive orders to lock down presidential records and who knows what else. And perhaps Gibson hasn't yet read Lessig's The Future of Ideas, which argues that networked information may only be as free as those who own the networks want it to be.

In the long run, Gibson is undoubtedly correct: The truth will eventually come out. Unfortunately, that truth may come too late to help address the problems of today or tomorrow. Yet, Gibson's conclusion rings remarkably true and demonstrates again why he's such a great writer and visionary. Gibson writes:

"1984" remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to the core realities of 1948. If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.

We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.

Indeed. (I hope to get a chance to say a few things about Idoru when I'm finished with it...)

Posted 11:04 AM | ai books general politics

Big World of Law

It was a big week in the realms of law and law school. The SCOTUS kicked the week off with a big decision in the Michigan affirmative action cases; Sua Sponte linked up some reactions from blogville. The Court followed up and ended its session yesterday by striking down a ban on gay sex acts. (Full text of all the Court's decisions available in PDF form here.) For more interesting thoughts on these decisions, don't miss the conversation between Dahlia Lithwick and Walter Dellinger in Slate. (Plus today's entry here.)

On something of the other extreme of the legal realm, Sua Sponte threw down the latest entry in the ongoing and much appreciated thread of advice to future One-Ls. JCA provides a great service to those of us who will be heading to school this fall by linking to many of the other entries in this thread from the likes of Waddling Thunder, Alice, Garret, Dodd, and Jeremy (who responds to JCA's advice here). Taken all together, all of these blawgers provide an invaluable survey of insights on some of the biggest variables of law school. At this point, I can't really evaluate any of the advice, but I do hope to avoid the "it chews you up and spits you out in mangled pieces" kind of experience JCA seemed to have. Having just completed One L, I certainly hope (and am very confident that) Jeremy is right—law school just doesn't have to be that hard. I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Finally, and in a related vein, if you've got a blog and you're in or headed to law school, check out Law School Insider's special blogger offer: Two books for $10, so long as you have a blog and you promise never to sell the books. I've already ordered my two copies, but since I only need one, let me know if you'd like the other. [Link via JD2B a few days ago. Maybe if I complain about the lack of permalinks at JD2B every time I mention the site it will eventually add them? And comments would be great, too! JD2B always serves up great links; I bet it would attract some great conversation, too.]

Posted 06:20 PM | law school

Virtual Results

The MoveOn.org primary is over, and to no one's real surprise, no single candidate won more than 50%. The top three candidates were:

1. Dean: 43.87%


2. Kucinich: 23.93%


3. Kerry 15.73%

The next closest was Edwards at 3.19%, which means all other candidates were in the single digits. What seems most remarkable about these results is how different they are from the "conventional wisdom" we've been hearing from radio pundits, Democratic and Republican party people, and other media sources. All of these people talk about Lieberman and Kerry as front-runners (and as Joe Conason noted the other day, Lieberman and Kerry do lead in the most recent nationwide opinion polls), yet Lieberman only garnered a paltry 1.92% of the MoveOn vote. The disparity between random opinion polls and the opinions of MoveOn's members almost certainly highlights the fact that those members are further to the left than the "average" American. However, the disparity also suggests the influence of the media on public opinion: The media have been saying Lieberman and Kerry are the leaders, the polls show them leading, the media say they're leading, the polls show them leading, etc. It's a self-fulfilling circle. So in my book, the MoveOn primary accomplished an important goal by showing the "average" voter (should he/she hear about it, anyway) that what the media is telling him/her and what he/she sees in the polls is misleading, at best.

The same Conason piece mentioned above also notes that the Wall Street Journal has recently been giving Howard Dean favorable coverage. Conason's take on that is that the WSJ thinks that if Dean wins the Democratic nomination, Yubbledew will easily win the election because Dean is too far left for most Americans. I think (and hope) that the WSJ is wrong. From my little corner of the world it looks like the strategy of being a "moderate" has failed Democrats (see, for example, elections 2000 and 2002). For example, why should we vote for a Lieberman, who seems to agree w/the Yubbledew Whitehouse on just about every issue, when we could just vote for Yubbledew? Why vote "Yubbledew-lite"? If that appeals to you, why not just vote for the real thing (in all its extremist horror)? That's why I think Dean would be a great pick for the Democratic nomination: He's clearly differentiating himself from the Republicans, and that's a lot more than can be said for many of the other Democratic candidates.

Finally, the MoveOn primary is a reminder of how important it is that we are able to trust election results. The debacle of Election 2000 has shaken many citizens' faith in our electoral system. Several months ago I noted that some people think the demise of exit polling and the rise of Republican-owned computerized voting machines have put the final nail in the coffin of democracy in the U.S. Although I'm optimistic that that's overstating the case, it seems important that we come up with a way to somehow verify the results of Election 2004 so that, regardless of the outcome, we'll all accept it a little more easily. The best way I can think of to do that is with some sort of non-partisan, non-profit nationwide exit polling. I imagine a nationwide network of registered volunteers who would conduct these exit polls and report their findings to some central authority. Preferably, the volunteers would be respected (and trusted and non-partisan) members of their communities—perhaps clergy, perhaps lawyers, perhaps ???? And the central "authority" would have to be an equally respected and non-partisan body—perhaps something like Vote-Smart.org. The registered pollsters would have to undergo some sort of training to make sure that the polling was done uniformly and as scientifically as possible. The point would be that if the results of the vote-count differed dramatically from the results of the exit polls, we'd have evidence of foul play.

Does this sound good to you? Any ideas on how to get this moving? Perhaps we could get bloggers to start the Foundation for Election Result Accuracy (FERA). Anyone?

Posted 01:23 PM | election 2004

Transmogrify!

The redesign saga continues. You can now get your daily dose of ai in your preferred color scheme! Just click on the "transmogrify ai!" dropdown menu in the right column, choose a color, and feel the magic envelop you like the warm rays of the sun on a beautiful summer day. That wouldn't exactly be today in D.C., where the weather is hot and dangerous—according to the radio, the air is so toxic today (code red!) that, if possible, you should avoid standing outside to gas up your car. Wow, it's great to live in the city!

But the transmogrify thing is cool, don't you think? Thanks to Joni Electric's site-skinning info, which helpfully links to the Empty Pages Tutorial that worked the magic. The transmogrification doesn't affect anything but the home page, but hey, it's a start.

Now ai has its very own transmogrifier, just like _________. (Props to anyone who can fill in the blank—looking for a sort of pop cultural figure who had lots of fun w/a transmogrifier in the past.)

So what's your favorite color?

Posted 12:18 PM | Comments (4) | meta-blogging

The New ai

Introducing the new and improved ai! Your favorite cynical pre-blawg now features completely new, hot from the oven special sidebar features, including:

• ai Quick & Dirty: The new home for all those hot links that mostly speak for themselves. I use ai for a sort of database to keep track of interesting tidbits, but although I might want to remember something, I don't always have a lot to say about it. ai Q&D solves that problem. Visit the complete collection of quick and dirty links at the ai Q&D homepage today!
• An abbreviated blogroll: Readers have complained that the classic ai design was too cluttered. The new, simpler design features a shorter blogroll containing those links on which ai relies most for its wit, wisdom, and pithy commentary. But not to worry: You can still easily access the complete collection of ai links from the right-hand column of the ai Q&D homepage. Click early and often.
• One Year Ago Today: ai began publishing just over a year ago, so once it officially passes its one-year anniversary, this new feature will go live. Check back often so you don't miss a moment of the excitement! ;-)
• The ai Booklist: Your one-stop shop for all the basic details about the books in which ai is currently most interested. The ai Booklist features links directly to Amazon.com so you can buy buy buy with minimal hassle. It's all about consumption and kickbacks, so get clicking! [This feature is temporarily AWOL. We apologize for any inconvenience. Thanks. —the management]
• Creative Commons License: ai is now licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike license. This means you can do whatever you want with it, so long as you give proper credit and license the output under the same terms. Or something like that. IANAL (I am not a lawyer), so who knows what this really means...

Enough of the spiel. The truth is, I've been working on a redesign for days now and it's just not doing what I wanted, so this is what we get for now. The site should look right in IE for Windows and Mozilla for both Mac and Windows. (I've tested Camino, Firebird, and regular Mozilla.) It looks a bit off in Safari and Explorer for Mac. There's something funny about the way these Mac browsers handle background image positioning w/CSS (or maybe the problem is with all the other browsers—who knows), but I've given up on figuring it out for now.

Other problems: The countdown feature in the right column is clearly screwed up. Law school orientation begins August 16th, last I checked, so I don't know what's going on there. The "transmogrify ai" feature should allow you to change the ai color scheme, but that's not working right, either. (If anyone knows anything about PHP and can help make this work, I'd appreciate any tips.) Finally, what the hell happened to my damn booklist! Heads are going to roll!

Posted 01:33 PM | Comments (6) | meta-blogging

Warning: Redesign

FYI: ai is currently under construction. If the site disappears or begins behaving erratically, the problems should only be temporary. Thanks. —the management

Posted 12:44 PM | meta-blogging

Get This Party Started

If you're dismayed by the direction the U.S. is heading (wretched economy, global aggressor, increasingly imperiled domestic social programs, skyrocketing budget deficits exacerbated by obscene tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, etc.), and especially if you like to think of yourself as "liberal" or "progressive," then you definitely have reason to care about who wins the Democratic presidential nomination. However, because of the way the primary system works, most of us don't have much say in which candidates rise to the top of the pack in order to be serious contenders for that nomination. Not only that, but with so many candidates running, it's going to be pretty difficult for any one of them to gain the momentum he/she is going to need to defeat Yubbledew. Now, MoveOn.org is trying to change all that by holding a virtual democratic primary. Anyone can vote (you just have to register), so get to it! If the primary produces a clear front-runner, MoveOn plans to support him/her for the Democratic nomination and then for President. That could change the face of presidential elections forever. Don't you want to be a part of history? (Of course, if no front-runner emerges, MoveOn's virtual primary might have about zero effect, but, well, it's still worth a minute of your time to vote, I think.) And even if you don't want to vote, MoveOn is a good starting point for learning about the candidates at this relatively early stage. MoveOn has compiled a complete survey of most of the Democratic candidates' responses to seven questions MoveOn members voted most important for Democratic nominees to answer. (Lieberman refused to answer the questions; not surprising, since Lieberman is the leading contender for the title of "Bush-Lite.")

For more on the virtual primary, see "Progressive Popularity Contest" by Michelle Goldberg. She summarizes the event nicely when she writes:

Whether the MoveOn primary yields a meaningful measure of progressive support, Democratic aspirants are certainly taking it seriously -- some with grace, some with grumbling. The front-runners in the online race -- Howard Dean, John Kerry and Dennis Kucinich -- are trying to get out the vote while praising MoveOn for enhancing the democratic process. Those expected to fare poorly in the primary are attacking a process they say is skewed against their candidates, even as they urge their people to participate.

MoveOn's critics aren't wrong -- the process is tilted toward candidates favored by the group's progressive base. But MoveOn has never claimed to be a disinterested party, which is part of what makes the primary unique. It's less a survey of Democrats than a contest for the endorsement of American progressives, a group MoveOn aims to organize to balance the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

Apparently, Gephardt is among those who expects to do poorly, while Dean expects to do well. (I can't find the statement that Dean is supposedly rebutting, but Goldberg mentions in her article that it came from a Gephardt "staffer.") While it's not surprising to see the candidates sniping at each other (they're competing against each other, after all), it is dismaying. If the Democratic candidates throw mud all over each other, that will just leave less work for Yubbledew when the race is finally narrowed to two.

And on the subject of divisiveness, it's anyone's guess what's going to happen w/the Green party this election. L. and I actually went to a Dean rally last night in Arlington to watch him officially announce his candidacy, and although his speech was good, it was hard to pay attention because a Green Party supporter stood behind him throughout the majority of the speech waving a giant "Vote Green Party" sign. So here you have Dean saying "Let's take our country back!", while "Vote Green Party" is bobing over his shoulder the whole time. Halfway through the speech, Dean supporters tried various antics (climbing on a large stepladder, taping together multiple Dean for America signs) to obscure the Green Party sign, but that only escalated the whole spectacle into a foreboding symbol of what could happen in the upcoming election: The conflict between Democrats and Greens will become a colorful sideshow spectacle that dominates the media coverage of the Democratic campaign. Meanwhile, Yubbledew will get a free pass on everything (like he did in 2000) and we'll end up with 4 more years of Bush—but this time, he won't be restrained by the need to run for election again. I'd call that a nightmare scenario, which only makes it more crucial that the Democratic nominee be far enough to the left to bring some of those who voted for Nader in 2000 back into the Democratic tent. The MoveOn primary could do a lot to push things in that direction. Results will be published Friday...

Posted 09:49 AM | election 2004

Fun with language

I may be going to law school this fall, but some part of me is still a writing teacher—specifically, a business writing teacher (at least some of the time)—and there's lots of good stuff going on these days in the wacky world of business writing. First, one of the "Big Three" accounting firms has declared war on just the kind of nonsense business-speak I spent the last four years trying to get my students to recognize, abhor, and never write again:

Deloitte Consulting admits it helped foster confusing, indecipherable words like "synergy," "paradigm" and "extensible repository," but it has decided enough is enough. It is releasing Bullfighter, a new software program to help business writers avoid jargon and use clear language.

Yay Bullfighter! Even the name is pretty straightforward. Be sure you don't miss Deloitte's own speil about its new program—you can even take it for a test drive or download it yourself (if you use Windows 2000 or XP). And best of all, send an ecard to all your friends who are full of bull!

Yeah, this is going to take the business world by storm. Not. But hey, at least now we know that some business people know they write nonsense, and as GI Joe always said, "Knowing is half the battle!"

For still more fun with corporate America using language as if they're just making it up (wait! they are!), check out this exchange between Coca-Cola and a former English teacher. And remember to treat yourself well. Ordinary. Drink Dasani bottled water. ;-)

Stuff like this almost makes me wish I was going to teach business writing again this fall. (Wait. Did I really write that? What I really meant was I think it's time for more Playstation....)

Posted 07:36 AM | Comments (1) | life generally

Law School Update

When I'm not playing "Enter the Matrix," watching movies, or surfing the web aimlessly (life is hard here, you know?), I'm thinking a bit about that law school thing I'm supposed to be doing this fall. GW wanted an $800 payment on Monday, so I headed downtown to deliver it in person, because I can. The trip taught me a few things about GW I hadn't fully realized. For one, because it's an urban campus, things sometimes seem cramped. Instead of the broad lawns and wide sidewalks that separate buildings at suburban and rural universities, GW is divided by busy city streets.

Second, while some students may see an advantage to attending a law school located right on an undergraduate campus, I wonder if it might be better if the law school were more self contained. I spent nearly two hours going from office to office before I found exactly where I was supposed to pay my money. Of course, that's a common experience for someone new to a university campus, but I wonder if things would be simpler if the law school was more self-contained. It turned out the office I needed to visit was within the law school building all along, so maybe it is self-contained and no one I talked to yesterday realized that. Anyway, the problem was complicated a little by the fact that the main law school building (Stockton Hall, I think) is currently closed for renovation and asbestos removal, so some offices are in temporary locations. Anyway, I finally found what I was looking for and paid my money. Now all I have to do is figure out that financial aid thing.

Financial aid. I've been putting it off. I don't want to do it. I don't know what I need to do, exactly. So instead I've been reading books. I started One L by Scott Turow and, while some of it is interesting and helpful, it's also pretty melodramatic. Last night I laughed out loud when Turow started a new section with, "Finally, during that second week, I began to volunteer in class." He then goes on for over six pages about the way he agonized over speaking in class and what everyone else thought about it and all the pros and cons and worries about competition and what other students would think of him and yadda yadda yadda. Come on! Talk or don't talk, but shut up about it, will you? Reading this book makes me realize that law school has to be one of the most overly-scrutinized academic endeavors a person can undertake. In what other academic discipline can you find dozens—if not hundreds—of books about preparing for school, taking tests, dealing with professors, or whether to speak up in class? I just left grad school in English and as far as I know there are less than a dozen books (and that's being generous) on these topics as they relate to English. What is it about law school that makes students such navel-gazers? If I had to guess I'd say it's that law is one of those mysterious professions everyone is aware of but knows little about. Like medicine, perhaps, the law just seems very difficult and complex and high stakes; therefore, people are interested in it, they think about it, and they write about it. However, I wonder if a lot of what is written about the law and law school is just self-perpetuating. Everyone watches "The Paper Chase" and reads One L before they go to law school, and both of these narratives are highly melodramatic and focus on the mysteries and difficulties of law school, therefore lots of students expect law school to be melodramatic and mysterious? I don't know. What I do know is that I don't want to participate in all that if I can avoid it. When/if I start writing melodramatically about law school, slap me, will you?

(Oops, is it too late, already?)

Besides, according to Brush with the Law, that whole debate about whether to speak up in class is a non-issue so long as you don't go to a zero-sum school with a bunch of zero-summers who think that everything good that happens to you must mean something bad is going to happen to them. (I've got to take time to write up my thoughts on that book. I'll do it, really. Soon.)

So instead of worrying about whether to speak up in class, here's some Flash fun for ya: Bushenstein, the story of Yubbledew's plan to remake the Supreme Court. [Link via SixFourteen, which didn't like it at all.] And in the related vein of "Why is our world upside down?" don't miss Tom Tomorrow's indictment of the Christian terrorists —careful! They're all around us!

Posted 11:08 AM | Comments (2) | law school

Dandy Dando

One of the great things L. and I have been looking forward to about moving to a city is the chance to see more live music. Last Friday night we checked out one of the top picks recommended by the Washington City Paper—Evan Dando at the Black Cat. Back in the day I was a fan of Dando's old band, The Lemonheads, so I knew the show had potential, but I was skeptical; when lead singers go solo sometimes they change things up so radically that they're hardly recognizable. I'm glad to report that's not really true of Dando. He played some great new music from his album, "Baby I'm Bored," and jammed out on some old Lemonheads tunes to please the old fanbase.

Dando hit the stage alone with his acoustic guitar at about 12:15 to play five or six solo acoustic tunes, including notably "Favorite T" from Come On Feel. Dando's voice seemed older (it is) and rougher, like he's smoked a few too many cigarettes, perhaps, or is just out of practice. His range seemed smaller and his voice sometimes cracked on transitions between notes. His acoustic guitar was also jerky and at times it sounded and looked like he was working really hard to find the right chords and transitions. But hey, I don't play, so what do I know?

After the short acoustic set, Dando was joined on stage by a three-piece band featuring none other than Juliana Hatfield on base. Hatfield played and sang with the Lemonheads on several albums—not to mention putting out a lot of great music in her own right—so in a lot of ways, it was like seeing the Lemonheads reborn. The band performed some of the major Lemnheads hits, including: It's A Shame About Ray, Drug Buddy, Big Gay Heart, and Rudderless. Highlights for me were a super rockin' doublespeed version of Down About It and a slightly slowed but still energetic version of Confetti, one of my favorite songs that features exactly the kind of almost-too-cute-yet-nonetheless-poignant lyrics that always made the Lemonheads great: "Well he kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he coulda, the story's getting closer to the end. He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he coulda, but he'd rather be alone than pretend."

In all, it was a great show. If Dando comes your way, and if you were ever a Lemonheads fan, don't miss it.

Posted 09:09 AM | life generally

Left Coast Gone?

Um, does anyone know what happened to Left Coast Expat? It seems to have disappeared in the couple of weeks since I was able to read it regularly; now all I get is this blogspot error page. Matt, are you out there?

Posted 02:34 PM | Comments (2) | meta-blogging

Enter the Matrix

Posting may be blippy until I finish playing "Enter the Matrix." This is the first "modern" game I've ever played, and it's pretty damned addictive. My last real quality time w/any sort of console game was "Sonic the Hedgehog" on the Sega Genesis system. I think that was in about 1995 and it was a couple of years old then, so this is a major leap in game playing. What Do I Know had an amusing post a while back about how addictive these things can be; I thought he was kidding. Now it looks like I might have to do what he did and expel the thing from my house if I ever want to get anything done.

Of course, I think a big part of the appeal is just that this game is related to the Matrix franchise, which as you know, I'm obsessed with. You may have heard that the game features about an hour of new footage that wasn't in "Reloaded" but which is supposed to fill in holes and add detail to what is in the movie. Those are some of the best parts, and it's fun to play knowing that you might be rewarded w/more movie footage just around the next corner. Yes, some of it seems redundant and none if it thus far has been earth shattering, but two scenes stand out. In the first, a grizzled old man laughs maniacally at Niobe (played in the movie by Jada Pinkett-Smith and one of the main characters of "Enter the Matrix") just as she's about to jack out of the matrix. The man keeps repeating "72 hours," and when Niobe asks what he's talking about, all he'll say is "that's how long the last Zion lasted: 72 hours" (followed by more maniacal laughter). Is this important to the greater story arch of the three films? Maybe. Maybe not.

The other notable scene is a duplication of the scene from "Reloaded" when Persephone (the Merovingian's wife/girlfriend/lover) forces Neo to kiss her like he means it. In the game, Persephone forces Niobe to do the same thing. I guess the W Brothers figured gamers would dig some hot girl-on-girl action? But why duplicate scenes like this? (There's also a lot of similarities between a lot of the scenes w/the Keymaster in both the game on the movie, except in the game the characters interacting w/the Keymaster are Niobe and Ghost instead of Neo, Trinity, and Morpheous.)

Ok, so that's much more than you ever wanted to know about a video game, but in semi-related news, apparently Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) recently pulled jury duty. And in the same surreal vein, Egypt has banned "Reloaded". I guess they don't know the revolution will not be cinematized.

Posted 02:30 PM | Comments (13) | ai movies

Law School Nightmares

This gives me nightmares. I so do not want to have to write like that. I am not unwilling, nor am I unexcited about it; rather, I'm just not unreluctant.

Ick.

Posted 02:14 PM | Comments (1) | law school

Coming Soon

Hey Survivor fans: Jenna in the buff. She's making hay while the sun shines, I guess.

Posted 02:11 PM | life generally

Future Think

What am I going to use a JD for? Well, are all lobbyists evil? Say what you want about Ralph Nader's run for president in 2000 (I've said plenty myself), Public Citizen rocks my world.

Posted 02:10 PM | law general

Bullshit

U.N. Grants U.S. war crimes exemption. (At least it's only for a year, but the U.S. has a history of making sure things like this are permanent, even if it is on a yearly renewal basis.)

Posted 02:07 PM | general politics

Alive and Kicking

Hi. Sorry for the silence at ai. The trusty ai production iBook is now winging its way to Houston for repair -- most likely it will receive a new hard drive and return to me within a few days as good as new. Meanwhile, I'm getting by w/L's trusty Dell Inspiron, which is older than my iBook and is still working w/out problems, so chalk one up to the evil empire. ;-) (Note: When I first started using this machine to surf the web a week or so ago it was crashing 3-5 times/day. I downloaded the Mozilla Firebird browser and quit using Explorer and guess what? No more crashes. Chalk one up for open source!)

Andbutso, the lack of my very own dear computer has meant many things, one of which is no ai posts, though it appears the world has not stopped turning while I:

• Drove a 17-foot U-Haul tornado (which is what it sounded like from inside the cab) halfway -- ok, a third of the way -- across the country towing L's car and all our worldly belongings. L drove some, too. Scratch "truck driver" from the list of things I might possibly want to do for a living in my imaginary romantic future. Not fun.


• Unpacked (mostly).


• Learned that driving anywhere w/in the D.C. metro area takes at least one hour, usually three. Hooray for the Metro! Every time I ride the train I'm fascinated anew by the wonder of public transportation. It works so damn well it's almost a miracle!


• Saw "Gigantic," the huge documentary about They Might Be Giants. We saw it at the new AFI Silver Theatre, to which we happily live quite close. We'll be seeing lots of cool indie films here maybe. Yay!


• Saw Illegal Art, an exhibition of "art that uses copyrighted or trademarked material without permission." Check out the Visuals page for some samples. Don't miss the story of Kembrew McLeod, the University of Iowa professor who trademarked the phrase "Freedom of Expression" and is now apparently suing AT&T for using that phrase in its advertising. Ironies abound. Kieran Dwyer's "Consumer Whore" Starbucks satire is also notable, especially since Starbucks has gone to so much effort to make sure no one sees it. (More on that story here and at Dwyer's site.) Link to the anti-logo and tell all your friends! And hey, "Illegal Art" is heading to San Francisco soon, so if you're there, I recommend it.


• Saw one of Sam Shepard's many great American dramas, "A Lie of the Mind." We also saw "True West" at another DC theatre while visiting sometime last year, so seeing Shepard in DC is becoming something of a tradition.


• Played Texas Hold-Em w/L.'s sister and friends. Lots of lawyers and political activists in the mix, which made for interesting conversation, much of which I mostly stayed out of for fear of outing myself as the leftist radical I think I am. See, strategically I'm thinking I need to try to get along w/people who love Scalia and think the way Yubbledew was placed in office was fair and legitimate. I'm going to be working w/people like this for the foreseeable future, right? So I need to learn to find a way to do that, it seems, without constant battling and flaring tempers. But L. asked a great question after we left: "When does thinking strategically slip into selling out?" Ah yes, it's the question of law school, isn't it? Because law school is a strategic move for me -- it's an attempt to do something from within "the system," rather than from the fringes (academia) where it seemed all I'd ever be able to do was bitch and moan. (No offense to current academics -- that was just how I came to see my future and it has nothing to do w/what you're doing and going to do.) When does strategy become strategery?


• Saw "Coupling" Disc 1 via our brand new NetFlix subscription. Hilarious. The setups for the jokes are often long and layered, leading to huge, belly-laugh payoffs at the end of each episode.

So you see, it's really just all about the entertainment here in summerland. I should be getting a job or something, but, well, I'm well-fed and protected from the rain, so it's kind of hard to be bothered. Perhaps the motivation will strike soon. I moan that all the good jobs are unpaid, but I'm fully aware that's no excuse for sitting on my ass gorging myself on the copious produce of the various segments of the U.S. entertainment industries. I mean, if I'm not going to be getting paid for the next two months, I might as well see if I can help someone out in some way, right?

But until that happens, perhaps I'll just help Unbrand America to make up for some of my consumer guilt. And then, of course, there are all those books I was going to read. After reading Brush With the Law, it's pretty hard to fight the "screw it, I'll worry about it later" attitude w/regard to law school prep. Maybe I'll just ride my bike.

Posted 11:19 AM | Comments (3) | life generally