Legal Beagle

Do you remember how in Planet of the Apes, the apes always talk about how evil and repulsive humans are because they kill each other and seek revenge? Well, my beagle, Molly, recently sought revenge for some ants that bit her in the mouth while she was eating, as evidenced by this picture:

You can't really tell what's going on, but this crater used to be a big ant pile. I think this is equivalent to shooting somebody 18 times.

Always a groomsman; now finally a groom

A good friend of mine, and the best man at my wedding, got married this past weekend. Charlie has been in, I think, at least 10 weddings and was finally part of his own. The ceremony was intimate and beautiful, the reception was fun, and the occasion joyous. This picture was taken during the bride-and-groomsmen picture session. As you can see, I am the only one not paying attention.

Congratulations, Charlie: I hope Sara will be as good a roommate as I was.

Pagans in State Government

I saw a really funny headline, at least if you grew up in the Bible Belt: "Perry Appoints Pagan to the Aerospace and Aviation Advisory Committee." Haha . . .

I also had a terrible conversation with my landlord yesterday. We're out of town for a friend's wedding, and I forgot to give our animals extra food. I called up my landlord to see if he could unlock the door for my in-laws so they could feed our animals. Unfortunately, he was unavailable. Then:

Me--"OK, so could Mrs. Roper* possibly unlock the door?"
Mr. Roper--"Mrs. Roper divorced me last summer."
Me--"Oh . . . uh . . . I'm sorry . . . I didn't know . . ."
Mr. Roper--"So are y'all going to renew your lease?"

Thankfully, I'm in law school and I've learned how to trample on people's feelings.




Ed. Note--Names have been changed. Extra points for anyone who can guess where this name came from.

Nobody's too sophisticated for Calvin & Hobbes

Now I'm sure that most of my readers don't even have to guess who this little kid is, but it has come to my attention that there is a significant lack of familiarity with Calvin and Hobbes at Baylor Law School. I'm not sure what English majors in Lubbock read, but apparently they grow up eating food like Calvin's mom made and don't even know it. In Division III, we wait until college to eat this stuff.

75 percent

One of my favorite lyrics of all time: "I'm so happy. How do you write about that?" Anybody know it? By the way, Justin Scott has my admiration and respect for guessing "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" from my last post. Anonymous got it, too, but after Barrister Scott.

The other day, I was driving home as Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Tuesday's Gone" was gracing my radio. Afterward, the deejay commented that it was one of the few songs in that station's reportoire in 3/4 time. Since then, I've been thinking about it, and the only other song I could think of is the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" (which may actually be in 6/8). Until this morning that is. I was belting out Billy Joel's "Piano Man" on the way to school this morning when Paul (the real estate novelist) told me it was in 3/4.

These are all three classic songs that have a special place in American culture and music history (at least "House" and "Piano Man"). Some psychologists and musicologists believe that there is a physiological basis behind why we like the music we do. I don't know about that, but I do know that most classic hymns (such as Amazing Grace) are in 3/4 and that most pop music is in 4/4. Could it be that the waltzy 3/4 rhythm catches our interest long after the 4/4 has faded into the background of life? Just wondering.

The King and the Queen Went Back to the Green

. . . but you can never go back there again." Billy Joel wrote that in what is currently my favorite song. If you can guess it, you'll win . . . my respect and admiration.



Just wanted to stick in a fun cartoon on a Monday morning.

So Professional

Which is more binding: the Hippocratic Oath or the Pledge of Allegiance?

Let me tell you about Marshall Goldberg's The Karamanov Equations. Surprisingly deep, the central conflict in the story is protaganist-surgeon Nick Sten's struggle between the Hippocratic Oath and the Pledge of Allegiance, even though you probably already know how that will turn out. The story takes place in the early 1970s, switching between Moscow (presumably), Wisconsin, and Paris. The Russians are about six months away from developing an impenetrable shield against any kind of guided missile (rendering all arms reduction negotiations pointless), but they've put all their eggs in one basket: Nikolai Pavlevitch Karamanov. The Central Committee freaks out when they learn that Karamanov has a clot in his carotid arteries--yes, both. To make matters worse, the clot is located just high enough on the neck that conventional clot removal would only kill him.

Enter Nick Sten. Dr. Sten has developed gas endarterectomy, which basically functions like a power wash. It can reach clots in arteries that no other method can, but the record is something like 8 survivors of 20 procedures. The Russians, desperate for their defense system, give Dr. Sten a call and ask him, through a ruse, to save Karamanov. The CIA catches wind of it and reminds him of his patriotic duty: to kill Karamanov on the operating table. Adding to the emotional mix is the fact that Sten's wife thinks he's leaving her for an old Parisian love from the Korean War.

As a political science major, I am always wary when novels enter the fray of politics, but this story was plausible. Goldberg reinforces the humanity of all sides (except, hehe, the French) and didn't get too carried away with the not-too-subtle message that doctors are more humane than Cold War government agents. The relationships between the various actors worked out decently and relatively unpredictably. The book closed well, with most of the important strings tied up.

In sum--I recommend it as reading to give you pause.

Ode to the Left Hand

So I'm sitting there in precal one day in high school. It's about 7:30 in the morning, and my best friend, southpaw Marcos del Patel walks in. Marcus is about 6-2, 180, olive skin, brown eyes, black hair, and a body girls drooled over. He's also the school's best Tenor I. He strolls in several minutes late, as usual. Ms. Krause (Krazy K to her fans), fresh from attending the 50th reunion of a high school class she taught, rolls her eyes at him. The day has officially begun.

At some point, Señor Patel sharpens his pencil. He and I, closest confidants and co-Subway-employees, sat near each other. On his way to his seat, he stops at my desk and says "Don't you hate it how your butt shakes?"

Very odd pause. "What?"

"You know--when you sharpen your pencil? You get up there, everybody's watching you. You put the pencil in the sharpener, turn the crank, and [shakes his booty] shake, shake, shake?"

Right-handers (including me) throughout Krazy K's zero-hour precal class collectively pause. Once more with emphasis: "What?"

At this point, left-handed star-wide-receiver Shep turns around and points vigorously: "Yes! I hate that!!"

Now it's lefty-star-running-back B.J. Head*: "Agh!! The bain of my existence!"

Then, professional-Pittsburg-Pirates-LHP Zach Duke: "I bet a righty invented the pencil sharpener just to embarrass us."

In that moment, two star football players, a future Major League pitcher, and the king of the choir found friendship and solidarity in an unexpected place: the left-hand-pencil-sharpening-booty-boogie. And those of us who are majoritarian, middle-of-the-alphabet right-handers . . . well, we survived somehow.

Can I get a witness?




*--Ed.--Names have NOT been changed to protect anybody. Mr. Head's name really was "B.J. Head."

Long Haired Hippy

I was talking to an unbeliever before class, and I told her I once had long hair. She didn't believe me. Thence ->

I apologize for the hazy quality, but it's a picture of a picture. I have never learned how to scan . . .

Anyway, that's me on the left and my beautiful wife on the right. This picture was taken in my in-laws' living room back in February 2002. We had been dating for about 9 months at that point. This May, we'll have been together for 6 years (!!) and married for three. Believe me, you're not the only one who's shocked.

Une riske acceptable

Now that moot court is o v e r, I can get back to l-i-v-i-n. Like blathering.

I read Sphere a while back, and the more I think about it, the closer it comes into breaking into my best-books-ever stratosphere. In fact, I was so impressed with that book and Crichton's general way of thinking/writing, that I thought I'd look into some other doctors. For my birthday, my lovely wife got me four books, all by doctors:
- Keith Ablow's Compulsion
- Robin Cook's Acceptable Risk and Fatal Cure
and
- Marshall Goldberg, M.D.'s The Karamanov Equations.

I've read Compulsion and Acceptable Risk, and let me tell you something: they're just OK.

Compulsion was a very entertaining, fast-reading thriller with a psychiatrist-detective at the forefront. Some of the characters were thrown in for no reason, and the author was clearly biased toward a certain character for whom I had no sympathy. While it didn't break any new ground literarily, it was entertaining enough that I'd recommend borrowing it from the library or buying it from a used book store.

As for Acceptable Risk . . . let's just say that some books are written to be movies. The book begins with a foray into the Salem witchraft trials in 1692. Then we hop three hundred years into the future and spend the rest of the book getting to know one of the witch's descendants. The descendant's boyfriend discovers that the witchcraft hysteria was caused by a just-now-newly discovered mold in the rye bread eaten by the Salemites in 1692. The boyfriend develops a drug from the mold, and we spend most of the book watching the descendant vascillate about what she should do. Finally, in clicheish fashion, the house burns down during Salem's worst storm since 1692, and the world is set aright again. It felt very much like reading a slow-developing "thriller" movie, complete with the five minutes of break-neck thrills that suddenly end with explosions and massacre. I couldn't wait to finish the book, but not in the good way. I don't really recommend this.

I started The Karamanov Equations yesterday. Published in 1972, this book has all the indications of a classic, golden-age-of-science-fiction novel full of fun and science puzzles. If it sucks, I won't write anything else about it

Restless

So I didn't advance in the moot court tournament. C'est la vie. Now I'm restless. C'est aussi la vie. I've finished my homework for Monday. My wife is out shopping with her mother. It's a beautiful day. I'm sitting here putting stuff into my blog. Is anybody else restless? (For the record, my cat, too, is restless. She insists it's time to eat; I insist it's not. We'll see who wins . . .)

I find myself distracted lately. I could be studying for my finals (just 2 1/2 weeks away!), but I'm not. Instead, I'm uploading pictures of my cat looking at the camera angrily and telling my loyal readership (thanks guys) about how I don't want to study.

Any suggestions on how to solve the problem?

Note: Close Trunk from Outside

Sometimes people shock you. In high school, I used to hear a lot about people attempting suicide by overdosing on pills or "slitting" their wrists. I used to think that was so boring*--why not do something creative?

Well, let me tell you about Ms. Daniell. She got tired of life, so she crawled into the trunk of her 1973 Ford LTD and shut the latch. Apparently, this was pretty difficult:

The design features of an automobile trunk make it well near impossible that an
adult intentionally would enter the trunk and close the lid. The
dimensions of a trunk, the height of its sill and its load floor and the efforts
to first lower the trunk lid and then to engage its latch, are among the design
features which encourage closing and latching the trunk lid while standing
outside the vehicle.

Daniell v. Ford Motor Co., 581 F. Supp. 728 (D.N.M. 1984). Thankfully, after nine days in the trunk, somebody rescued her. I don't even want to imagine nine days in a trunk. Man, how hungry would she have been?

And for you tort reformers out there, the judicial branch got this one right: it found the trunk not defective.

Man, I love law school.

*--Lately, I've been accused of being insensitive. This just goes to show that my insensitivity goes farther back than anybody thought.

I hate blogger

Mikearoni & Plano:

I had a good ranting and raving post on the inadequacies of local business to compete with international chains, but Blogger didn't recognize a character and erased the whole thing. So here's my complaint in a nutshell:

1. You can buy coolness at Starbucks, but local coffee shops force you to grow it. My soil doesn't have the right nutrients to grow coolness, so I'll stick to buying grande mocha frappuccini instead of "medium gelati."

2. You just can't beat a 64-cent ice cream cone from McDonald's. 64 cents + fat free + a freakin ice cream cone = pure delight.

Superior products. Better service. Lower prices. That's why small businesses go out of business.

Hey man--you're in MySpace

Interesting article about presidential candidates and MySpace. I told you John Edwards is the best.

C'mon Mayonesa y Plano . . . let me get through Moot Court. Then I'll give you some Alico-style commentary. Since my last review, I've read Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery and Keith Ablow's Compulsion. Who knows--I may even finish Robin Cook's Acceptable Risk. You won't want to miss out . . . !

New Post Coming

I promise!

Dennis who?

Dennis Kucinich. I know, I know: who? Apparently, he's a "dark horse" in the race for Democratic candidate in 2008. This is an interview in Newsweek that I thought you might like to see. I can't tell if he's arrogant or if he has that Texan flare: it ain't braggin if it's the truth. What do you think? And don't tell me about Barack. Only teenyboppers, wannabes, and posers like him.*




*Note--I would like Mr. Obama a lot more if he had been around a bit longer. I haven't heard anything exciting from him other than that he's got the guts to run for president so early in his career. As it is, I don't know anything about him (except that he and Hillary got in a fight, heh), and not knowing anything bothers me.

The Circle of Life

Sometimes it pays off when you keep on truckin'. When I first read Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain a couple of summers ago, I thought it was interesting but sadly disappointing. Then I read his Rising Sun, and found it much more enjoyable, but nothing special. Later, I read his The Terminal Man, which I found interesting and somewhat innovative, but generally just OK. For some reason, despite all this mediocrity, I kept reading. I read A Case of Need, one of his first (and pseudonymous) novels, and found it quite enjoyable if a little hard to follow. I also read Jurassic Park back in junior high, before I knew what reading was about. Now my reading has finally paid off. Let me tell you about Sphere.

The book opens with Norman Johnson, a psychologist, traveling to the South Pacific for what he thinks is a plane crash. (He's a contract psychologist for the FAA helping plane crash survivors cope with their survival.) Soon, we discover that the U.S. Navy thinks they've found an alien spaceship from the 1700s crashed onto the bottom of the ocean floor. Following a paper Dr. Johnson had written a few years earlier about how humans could cope (psychologically) with an alien encounter, the Navy has put together Dr. Johnson's recommended team: Ted, the astrophysicist; Beth, the biologist; and Harry, the mathematician. Now, in my opinion, the possibility for interesting conversation exponentiates when you put together a biologist, an astrophysicist, a mathematician, and a psychologist. Oh and throw in your stereotypically cynical Navy captain and his slightly unflat (character-wise) crew, and you get some highly interesting conversations and scenes. Let me put it this way: you can't imagine it; if you could, you wouldn't have to read the book. (OoOoOo--that's so sneaky . . .)

Finally, reading Crichton has paid off with something highly clever. I would liken this to the level of enjoyment of finishing Tim O'Brien's July, July or Tomcat in Love: nothing life-altering, but highly, highly enjoyable. Enough so to talk about it. (Ed. note--I do not mean to suggest that Dr. Crichton and Mr. O'Brien are anywhere in the same league; I just wanted to give my favorite author some props. If you haven't read any O'Brien, you probably don't know how to read.)

Literary recommendation: three books that will change your life:
John Steinbeck's East of Eden
Stephen King's It
Scott Turow's Ordinary Heroes

Is he real?

There's a lot of talk about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as revolutionizing American politics in 2008. I agree with my revered colleague, President Scott, as to Obama's potential to bring out the politics in our generation.

But John Edwards may be where it's at. If the linked article in Newsweek can be trusted and all this stuff he's spouting is real, he may be the best thing to come around in presidential politics since FDR.

Why doesn't anybody really care about the Republican candidates?

Let's Get Sirius

Growing up, I always heard that if you're really happy about something, then you're going to talk about it. I also always grew up hearing that you only talk to people about things they're interested in. I don't always follow the second axiom, but it governs more of what I talk about than the first. But I think the time has come for me to advise the world about the greatest invention since night baseball games:

Sirius Satellite Radio - I got Sirius as a college graduation present from my beautiful and excellent wife. I have never looked back. I love radio, and Sirius is the answer for the common radio. Come on--I get something like 10 pop stations (by decade), 10 or 15 rock stations, 10 or so country stations, 10 or so rap stations, 10 or so news stations, 10 or so everything. I even get French news for when I want to act like I remember stuff from high school. Besides that: Frank Sinatra is joining Jamie Foxx, Elvis, Jimmy Buffett, the Rolling Stones, and Howard Stern as famous people who get their own stations. Can you top that?

My advice--go by a satellite receiver and pay the $150 per year. That way, you don't have to worry about it ever again. If you don't have $150, it's something like $14 per month. You simply cannot beat that.

Influenza Outbreak

I think I said a few posts ago that I love taking exams. With that kind of attitude, I've never had a nightmare about an exam. Well, I got sick last week from about Tuesday evening until Thursday afternoon. Wednesday morning, around 4 a.m., I woke up several times sweaty and scared, thinking "Crap--I can't even figure out what the contract is . . ." (Thankfully, we had contracts that day.) I took the test and didn't notice anything crazy. (Keep in mind that at this point I was sick and didn't know it. It hit me hard Wednesday afternoon.) Friday morning, my good friend approaches me and says "Jeremy, lord and master of all that eyes can see [all my friends call me that], I've been meaning to ask you. What'd you think of contracts?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, I don't remember much of the contracts exam. I was sick."

"Oh, hehe. Well, after I got done reading the first question, I sat back and thought: 'Crap--I can't even figure out what the contract is . . ."

Needless to say my newly apparent prophetic powers disturb me.