Quick and dirty

I found this on Sugar, Mr Poon?'s blog. It links to interesting court cases. Actually he uses the term "Wacky", but I think everyone knows at this point that wacky=lame. Now that I think about it, reading a case recreationally about some lunatic who sued satan or a guy who sued himself and finding it interesting is kind of lame. If anyone could send me the cite for the Talking Heads case so that I can become even more tainted by L1 lameness I would appreciate it.
Not For Sheep has a link to a funny article on being a law student. I especially liked the part about the top twenty five lawschools ranked in the top ten.
I just found out that one of the Profs at my school keeps a blog. It didn't look to law related, but heres a link in case anyone else wants to check it out.
Ahh, I just found the Talking Heads case on The Clerk's blawg, see it's always useful to have him linked. Here's the cite if anyone else cares, actually we should make a game out of it and see who can find the most song titles. United States v. Abner, 825 F.2d 835 (5th Cir. 1987)
Also if anyone can explain to me what the deal is with And What Thanks Do We Get, I'd like to know. Why are people trying to figure out who they are, are we supposed to link them or not? You know the most pathertic thing about their blawg is that their associates act almost exactly like employees I've had when I managed restaraunts and guest services at hotels. I would kind of hope for a higher grade of employee, but I understand that having a degree doesn't mean you have a work ethic, or common sense.

M.E.Ch.A.

MECha is El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan. They're basically a Chicano student organization that deal with issues that affect them and their community. They're having their national conference in Corvallis this weekend. The Dream Act and the cutting of student funding were the big topics at this conference. I went down to participate in a march to to support farmworkers, the UFW, and PCUN. It was a two mile march, full of Si Se Puedes and Viva Cesars, in the pouring rain. There were almost no hecklers, one latched on to me and basically joined the march as we discussed various aspects of immigration and tax expenditure, and it went pretty smoothly. There seemed to be a lot of community support and the police were very helpful. The only time they seemed unhappy was when we stopped at Taco Bell to chant "Boycott Taco Bell" to support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
One thing that suprised me was when I told the Old Lady that it might ruin her political aspirations to be part of such a radical group's activity. She didn't get it. I told her MEChA was the organization that Cruz Bustamante was a member of and that his detractors made outrageous claims that they were radicals and Cruz was a radical and he'd open the border and what not. She didn't realize MEChA was that group. She thought Cruz was part of some secret underground kabal plotting against Californians. So it's good whenever the Mechistas can get out and represent themselves instead of lying rightwing nuts.
Viva Cesar, Viva MEChA, y Viva La Raza!

Trying to work on Fridays

Bekah at Mixtape Marathon has a post on trying to get stuff done on Fridays. I'm an especially bad procrastinator, it is now Saturday around 5 in the afternoon and I have yet to even look at the brief I'm revising. Spring break was this week and I haven't done one thing that's school related, unless maybe if I count my run in with the Customs agent at the border as an experiment in the border exemption to the 4th Amendment. Anyway I realized a long time ago, I'm thinking first week of September, that I never get anything done on Friday afternoon so it's not even worth trying. I try on Saturday now, and generally I fail until Sunday night around 9pm or Monday morning around 9:30 AM.
So my advice to anyone trying to get stuff done on a Friday when they could be going to a crawfish boil is to call it a day, but only on the condition you'll wake up early tomorrow. Then go out to the crawfish boil and have a couple beers, but don't really eat because you feel too busy to eat because you didn't do all the work you meant to do today and you're going to leave in a minute anyway so you can get to sleep early. Drink a few more beers, eat a baguette and have a couple more beers. Fend off offers to go to the new bar that has those really good kiwi daiquiris because you have to wake up early tomorrow to get some stuff done. Drink another beer and cave in. After the bar with the daiquiris go sing Karaoke until you croon a fine version of "Me and Mrs. Jones" and are asked to leave. At that point go home to sleep. Before you sleep set your alarm clock for 7AM because you need to wake up early to get stuff done. Notice that it's currently 4AM but dismiss it because you used to do this all the time in undergrad and it never really affected you. Drink a big glass of water and hit the sack with most of your clothes on. Wake up cursing to the sound of news on NPR at some ungodly early hour. Ask what freakin' idiot left the alarm clock set at seven until you remember that you were going to get some work done. Decide it's not worth waking up right now because you wouldn't do any work anyway and shut the alarm clock off and wake up at noon. That's my advice, and not because that's what I did this weekend and want everyone to be in the same boat.
Also don't cruise blawgs all afternoon before you "start to work", run across something you think is kind of funny and then spend ten minutes posting about it, which will remind you that there was one other thing you wanted to post about. Then finally getting to your brief, but not until you've done the Universal Crossword and made plans to see the Charlie Kauffman movie.

Check these guys out

Jeremy has got a review of "Trading Up" which sounds like a very interesting book. I read about it at Powell's and in the Atlantic awhile ago and this reconfirms that it's a worthy read.
Second Buffalo Wings & Vodka is freaking hilarious so go read it.

Tomahawk BBQ

I heard about the Tomahawk BBQ from Nardwuar the Human Serviette. Because I’m a goof I had to go and see it for myself. I asked the guy at the hostel for directions to Phillip Street in North Van (that’s what the locals call it, aren’t I hip).
“What are you looking for in North Van” the guy asks
I nonchalantly reply “The Tomahawk.”
Cheers erupt from the lobby, the guy looks at me with awe and asks “How do you know about the Tomahawk?”
“It’s my job to know”, I spit from beneath my black stetson.
Anyway we got directions and were on our way, but not before the guy could warn us, “Get the Chief Skookum burger, or Yukon breakfast. You’ll get meat drunk.”
Meat drunk sounded really cool to me, eating so much meat that I’d be out of my head.
I got the Yukon breakfast.

It had four pieces of Canadian bacon. I think American strips are a little better for dipping in egg, but Canadian discs are better for piling an egg and some hash browns on and feeling your arteries harden. The breakfast was awesome, I didn’t have time to get the Chief Skokum burger, but next time I will..
The people at Tomahawk were great. They gave us free microwave popcorn on the cob and headdresses like the crowns you get at burger king. I highly recommend it and wouldn’t consider any trip to Vancouver complete without a visit.

Chinatown

The Old Lady and I were walking around Vancouver; we visited Gastown, Chinatown, Yaletown, and Spooky Ass Cracktown. In Chinatown we saw a tank with live Alaskan King Crabs, a big octopus, and a lot of shops that sold mysterious dried stuff. You could make out the dried mushrooms, squids, and fish, but some of the stuff was completely unknown to me.
The best thing we saw was a huge fight between two proprietors of mysterious dried stuff shops. They were out on the street screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. We could hear them blocks away after we passed. You could tell that the community was close knit. Everyone else was on the curb watching the fight and calling their friends on the cell phones to tell them about the drama.
This may seem like a bit of schadenfreude but I think it was a good example of how the law community in Oregon is. It’s small and if you do anything wrong it’ll get around fast. I can imagine coming across someone from my class in the bar bulletin’s discipline section. It would take me about three seconds to be on the phone to my friends to tell them. I figure within four hours we would have gossiped to everyone in our class. Word will spread fast, especially among the more competitive set. We'll all be out on the curb airing the dirty laundry.
So kids keep your noses clean.

Spring Break

The Old Lady and I went to Seattle and Vancouver B.C. for our spring break. I got some fresh oysters, which were delicious. They were slightly salty, a little meaty, and a good size. The Old Lady said that she wouldn’t eat raw oysters because you can get hepatitis from them. I obviously didn’t buy into that line of thinking. I like to think of myself as being culinarily adventurous. My only failing is I can’t get behind eating mushrooms. Some varieties gross me out to the point I have a hard time smelling them being cooked.
Anyway back to culinary adventures. I’ll eat pretty much anything once, and then again from somewhere else just to make sure it was prepared properly the first time. This means putting things I don’t like into my mouth twice. I’ll eat eel, chicken feet, iguana, cow brains, intestine, and tripe. If you’ve got something else exotic and tasty I’ll eat that too. This comes from growing up in El Paso and being bicultural. Foods Americans think are nasty, unclean, or disgusting are a common part of Mexican cuisine. Things Mexicans wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, creamed chip beef on toast jumps to mind, are staples of American cuisine.
But hepatitis isn’t a matter of cuisine choice. It’s a serious disease, maybe worth laying off the raw oysters for. But I laugh in the face of hepatitis. When I was a kid my old man would take me to Juarez, which is the city on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. My mom would always warn him not to give me any ice cream because it could carry hepatitis, they didn't pasteurize milk then. Some of my fondest memories are of my old man and me hiding behind a corner wolfing down ice cream bars while my mom was bargaining for tortillas or something. After years of eating possibly tainted ice cream, improperly cooked pork, and various spooky things off of handcarts in Juarez I never caught anything. I have a hard time believing that a half dozen fresh oysters from the private beds of some fancy joint would ever be as dangerous as a seafood cocktail (these seafood cocktails were made from octopus, squid, and shrimp that sat in the sun all day with no refrigeration) in Juarez. I’ll continue eating oysters until they take them from my cold jaundiced hands.

Spring Break

Prof. Torts cancelled the 9 AM class at 8:45 AM today. I guess it's cool because I've got two extra hours of spring break, didn't have to drive to school, and I'm actually awake. There is real live sunshine outside, a miracle for Portland this time of the year. So spring break is starting off great. However I still need to go to school to drop off some paperwork and pick up part of my brief. Furthermore, if Prof. Torts had cancelled class last night I could have gone out and lived it up instead of sitting in my room and reading torts all night. To quote my lovely friend Miss L, "I could have been hungover right now."

I'm very excited about spring break. My reading list includes the following. Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War, The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, and tons of cookbooks. I'm going to hit the library and flesh it out later today.

The Old Lady and I are going to go to Seattle and Vancouver BC, so I'll technically get to visit a foreign country like some of the rich kids. Should be fun.

Job

We will not use that word in my presence.

Battlestar Galactica

Multnomah County, which is the county that Portland is in, has a great library. It is easily the best library of any city I have ever lived in. The DVDs of the entire Battlestar Galactica television series are available and I checked them out. I did this partly out of some nostalgia and partly to show my old lady, who finally said I could look at her blog, what the original show was like. We watched the piece of crap remake with Edward James Olmos and I was sorely disappointed. She couldn't understand why. Anyway in an effort to educate her on the virtues of crappy late 70's sci-fi television I checked it out.
The clerk at the library laughed while I was checking it out and warned me that it was "a really bad piece of crap". Although this is true, I think he, along with my old lady, missed the point. At the time this was so cool. Star Wars had created an insatiable appetite in me, and pretty much every boy my age I knew, for spaceships in dog fights. We would reenact epic dogfights against the cylons from our cardboard vipers. My cousin and I would argue over who got to be Starbuck at least once a week. Some of the most brutal fights me and my cousin ever got into were over who got to be Starbuck. I was deadset on being Starbuck and if that meant punching my cousin in the stomach or hitting him with my big wheel, then so be it.
On a side note, a friend told me that the Battlestar Galactica was funded by the Mormons, or LDS as they now like to be called. After watching half the pilot I think it's possible. I lived in Salt Lake City for about 8 years and learned a fair amount about the LDS and it does kind of synch up.
Anyway, I'm reliving my misspent youth by watching a crappy sci-fi show full of Mormon propaganda. I'm also not going to check this post for TRAC. Swear to God.

Asking Questions

I asked Prof. Crim Pro about the Crawford case which is getting talked about on all the real attorney's blawgs. This is something I've got to be more cautious about. He told me it was interesting and I should go research it and the Roberts case. So basically the answer is research. Think before you ask.
I got the Ex Parte Quirin case off of Lexis too. I'm going to read it before I ask Prof. Con Law about it. I might ask Prof. Crim Pro about it, but I'd probably end up with a memo. Anyway Ex Parte Quirin is the case of the saboteurs during WWII that were all executed and the basis of the Bush Administrations cool idea that American citizens can be held indefinitely without charges or a trial. Due Process is for suckers anyway. Here's the cite for all you wild party animals. 317 U.S. 1

Busy

I finished my memo on Sunday. We're behind everyone else on the appellate brief. This is the first real step on it and it'll later be incorporated. It was a hassle and I'll work on it more, but it got me thinking. This weekend, instead of working on my memo diligently, I rebuilt my bed, put together a shelf system for the bathroom, cleaned house a little, helped my friend move, went to the hardware store, bought a suit, did my taxes, listened to some NPR, read a book about Stagger Lee, and watched some Battle Star Galactica. If I had a memo due every week I would get so much done.
I start spring break next week. I downloaded a bunch of cases in anticipation of having free time to read. I also need to apply for some scholarships. If anyone knows of anyone who wants to pay for other people to go to lawschool let me know. I can write a 1000 word essay on the biggest influence in my life or the most important American or something.

Food Network

Weekends are kind of a treat because I have some time to watch Food Network, unfortunately Rachel Ray always seems to be on. She drives me up the wall, she behaves like a bad child actor with exaggerated facial expressions, she has a stoner laugh, and her cooking (if you can call it that) consists mostly of heating up various cans of food and dowsing it with E.V.O.O. Now if you're going to make up a snappy acronym for something then don't freaking immediately repeat what the acronym stands for. It makes the acronym pointless and it makes you sound like Rachel Ray.
I wish they'd put on Nigella Lawson instead. Actually I wish they just had a Nigella network, maybe with appearances by Anthony Bourdain and the girl from Everyday Italian. That would be perfect.

Peter Jackson

I'm a big Peter Jackson fan, I saw Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Dead Alive. I was really happy to see him win all his oscars, but I swear to god that he looks like he picked his clothes up off the floor the morning of the oscars, gave them the smell test, and got dressed and went. As Mr. Poon pointed out, it's not that hard to button the top button.

Jeremy's Blog

I'd like to point out that I added Jeremy's blog as a link off to the side there. It's a great blog, he's a smart cat and well worth reading. Y'all should bookmark his blog and pass it on to your friends who work at hot shot publishing firms in NYC.

Moleskin

I needed a pocket calendar/notebook. I'm really bad at remembering things so I write it down. Anyway I've been looking around for a notebook and I saw moleskins. I thought they looked perfect for what I wanted, but they were way overpriced. The whole pitch of "Van Gogh, Matisse, Hemingway used these very notebooks to create art, and so can your privileged suburban ass" secretly appealed to me. I'm so bourgeois. I joked around about them with some of my friends, but I broke down. I bought one. I'm a consumer whore and I suck. Anyway I found a blog all about moleskins. It's about the work people do in them, and etc, etc.
I'm sure it was all done voluntarily, without any prompting from the Corp that makes them. There was just this huge upswelling of consumer joy and one of the happy customers decided to make a blog all about moleskins.. Fantastic pieces of art, wonderful photos in exotic locals, and shiat poetry are all contributed because that's exactly the kind of stuff people with moleskins. do.
So I apologize to all my fine readers, basically my old lady and who ever else stumbled onto this, for being a consumer whore and a moleskin. lover, even though I only just got mine.