this is our friend Pete dancing...nice hat, tard.

Law School Library: Final Solution

Its only a matter of time until we scrap the books entirely and plaster the walls with something like this. This will 1) clear up a lot of space and 2) drive away those pesky old people that wander around looking for random volumes of the ALR.

Google Update

I'm really excited to announce that the combination of the words "OC" and "postmodernism" has shattered all previous The Revolution is Not a Dinner Party "keyword analysis" records! A whooping 15 people have come here looking for intellectual analysis of low culture. I couldn't be happier. It's all coming together baby. YEAH!

This is one of my favorite pictures.

Those wacky Europeans

What to do in case of Avalanche. [from Drudge]

Whoa, sometimes the hype is right!

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with Conor Oberst or his erstwhile band, Bright Eyes. He's been on a media-love-fest bender this month, on the cover of TONY and the Times and several other exciting publications. Anyway, I've never given this guy a chance...mainly cause of my own failure to achieve wunderkind status (i've always been more of a generalist...yeah, that's the ticket).

Anyway, I got a hold of Digital Ash in A Digital Urn, the more "experimental" of the two new Bright Eyes albums. Its not perfect, many of the songs sound the same. But, many of them are VERY good. Especially "Gold Mine Gutted," which feels like the soundtrack to an endless, melancholic moving walkway ride (a la The Graduate).

So everyone in Mercer really needs to put all their music on Itunes and share it with the rest of us. FYI, my library is "Kerry Strug's Music." I like my music collection. Also, you can actually copy shared music using a program called m-y-t-u-n-e-s r-e-d-u-x. You don't need the dashes, that's just my cheap attempt to not get caught stealing music. Search for it on google.

This is why no one wants to deal with social security...

My dad sent me this article. Its kind of scary to think that the social security surplus has been spent by our lovely government on fun stuff like missile defense and pork barrel highway projects. But don't worry, its been exchanged for extra-super-special bond certificates.

Living in a mystery

Prompted by my AOL IM and my general love for TV, I had to watch the new Smallville / Jack and Bobby evening o' WB. Shockingly, both featured off-handed use of the word “Lojack.” As in, “who put the lojack on…” or “what, you lojacked my vibrator?” I am not a grammar aficionado. But, there seem to be only two possible explanations. Either “lojack” has entered the pop culture lexicon and I missed out entirely. Or, product placement has run amuck. Here’s an alternative to Lojack. Fight the power.

Ha...wouldn't you all enjoy it if my intense paranoia regarding my own hipness or lack thereof drove me into a noir-esq caper to find the ‘truth’ behind the evil junta of Lojack, TV Writers, and The WB. I'll don a TVMan outfit and go off searching for a kilo of opium buried at the Jonny Carson funeral.

Update: My first scoop

You heard it here first…days later in the New York Times.

Are other people as excited as me about the upcoming Michael Jackson trial? 4 weeks for jury selection! Months of trial!! Its like OJ without the bloody aftertaste...or the cute and loyal Akitas.

Netflix kicks ass

So my first two movies on my re-started netflix account have both been spectacular 5-star successes:

1) Harold and Kumar go to White Castle: A roadtrip movie about an Indian-Korean friendship, forged in billowous clouds of marijuana (aren't all the best friendships founded in pot? don't all the best roadtrips involve weed?). Even better, its written by Jews from Jersey. This movie is hysterical.

2) Goodbye, Lenin: One of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Berlin is the coolest place on earth, and this movie captures that city's modern founding (its "constitutional moment" if you will). The best part is that it does this through totally sympathetic characters AND maintains a solid sense of humor. What happened in Berlin in 1989 was amazing, and the movie basically explores how profound and pervasive those changes were and how much life changed for so many people in so little time. The plot summary makes this sound like a sad movie. But really, its often laugh-out-loud funny. The best movies open a window into worlds that are totally different from our own, and do so in an engrossing way. Another example would be In This World.

P.S. Huge shout out to Jerome Bettis, PLEASE STAY!
P.P.S. Plexico Burress is a big baby, good riddance to the 3rd best receiver on the team
P.P.P.S There's always next year
P.P.P.P.S. The most miserable part of the whole loss is surely going to be reading Bill Simmon's (no doubt erudite, smug, and funny) article. Enjoy, dick. My guess at the thesis: "Why did Belichick have to be so nice to the Steelers after the game...everyone feels bad for the city for being a shithole, but should that really rain on the Patriots parade?"

Check out these comments posted to Roethlisberger's web page after the game (scroll down). I don't usually support the use of the word "blessed," but I agree whole-heartedly with the sentiment.

This is the last you'll hear from me on the Steelers for a while. I do, however, reserve the right to respond to the Sports Guys inevitably witty musings on the game.

If you don't like football, here's something else to be depressed about. All those fancy-pants legal and financial jobs in New York are predicated on USA's role as a lender of last resort.

DESTINY'S BACKWASH

I have too much respect for Bill Belichick to say anything negative.

As for Torre-Belichick. The only connection is that the current Patriots are not very different than the '99 Yankees....good group of guys, fun to watch, play together better than the sum of their parts. So, in honor of all my townie friends let me say a resounding, "Fuck the Patriots!"

P.S. You'll never hear another criticism of Tom Brady from me. He's already a hall of fame quarterback.

Google, you freak me out sometimes.

A search for any combination of the words "Rothlisberger" and "Jewish" puts my page in the top ten results. What's really fucked up is that I am always following this garbage from the janitors over at stormfront.org.

Furthermore, the text summary of my site on google is:

"... Here's a story about the humble and loving Rothlisberger family. ... I hate holocaust tourism. I went to Thereseinstadt when I was 16 w/ a Jewish youth group. ... "

The reference about the holocaust is from this post of mine.

Of course, several things are alarming: 1) It pains me to come across (by association) as a nazi 2) Big Ben's name is "Roethlisberger"... In the end, I'll take "stupid and bad at spelling" over "bigoted asshole" any day.

Roethlisberger is not Jewish, but we'd be happy to have him on the team (not kabala, of course, because that would mean that the fame was getting to his head). Here is Ben's old blog. Here is his new website. There is a lot of stuff on the blog, I haven't had a chance to really read much of it...I'm pretty sure, however, that its no www.runrickyrun.com. But, its still cool. The kid is a class act.

Breaking news: free Chipotle burrito coupons available

I was in the Mercer housing office, and casually asked if there were any chipotle certificates available. The woman at the desk said no, but then someone came out of their office with a fresh stack of 200 or 250 coupons. I took "some." But, I wanted to give my readership a heads-up to stop by the Mercer office bright and early on Monday for some fine burrito love. To those of you for whom this makes no sense- I'm sorry.

The public nature of this notice is one lone (and lame) act of protest at the shameful situation over "I am on Law Review." I know that having to actually pay for Chipotle is a painful and humiliating experience. But it is still no excuse for knee-jerk erasure of one of the funnier things I've seen in a while. Where do blogs go when they die?

Bush's Speech: Cheapening God and Elevating Terror

“For a half a century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical. And then there came a day of fire. We have seen our vulnerability and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.”

- There’s certainly nothing new here. But, as a codification of the dogma of Bush, it is still worth thinking about. Obviously the millenialist reading of 20th century history is troubling. But, the sad fact is that too many people in America today lead nasty, brutish, and short lives. These people (and their slave-drivers) are Bush’s polity. That they take refuge in the opiate of the masses is hardly surprising and it should not be surprising that Bush finds himself peddling the opium. That their particular opiate revolves around an intense yearning for the end of the world might reflect nothing more than the extreme intensity of the nastiness, brutishness, and shortness of their lives. Furthermore, the failures of liberal policies to actual do anything about the quality of these people’s lives cannot escape blame.

- What I find much more troubling is the duelist undertones- the idea of abstract (independent?) forces of freedom and anti-freedom battling out the End of Days here on mortal earth. On a practical level, this is completely nonsensical and predicated entirely on the concept of “them hating our freedom.” I’ve never once heard a Bush apparatchik explain the mechanism whereby people “simmering in resentment and tyranny” are driven to attack the symbols of freedom that they presumably yearn so dearly for. Furthermore, I’m not sure if it is philosophically coherent to force freedom on anyone. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never taken this president’s words at face value (that would be like listening to god’s parrot’s shadow). But, here the rhetoric itself is dangerous. Establishing Osama et al as a necessary and intrinsic counterpart to our society and our freedom does more to legitimate terror than a thousand poorly worded fatwah’s. If I understand the “thought” behind the speech it would seem to be that as long as 1) we have freedom 2) other people don’t 3) Osama will happen. Now, I understand that the conclusion in Bush-world is that this is justification to go out and make everyone free. However, this is practically (we don’t care about un-free people in Sub-Saharan Africa, and we care too much about freedom-hating oppressors in places like Pakistan and Uzbekistan) and philosophically (see above) impossible. He’s actually legitimating our enemies, bringing them up to the level of geopolitical necessity, w/o an end in sight.

- The reason why Bush et al would do this, I think, has everything to do with the end of the Cold War. The wall falling threw our entire foreign policy establishment in flux. It would be as if the NFL suddenly required all players to wear ice skates and replaced the football with a frisbee. No one knew what to do. The simple fact is that its easier to wage foreign policy against an enemy than against a bunch of friends. In fact, the 1990s saw a real (arguably necessary) degradation of U.S. economic power vis-à-vis international treaties and the regionalization of international trade and finance. Fast forward to 9/12/01. The only lens by which our current foreign policy establishment had to deal with the new threat was the Cold War. The main ideological divide between scholars during the Cold War was on the relative merits of containment. Containment’s proponents argue that it worked. Its detractors say we were lucky. By historical accident (and a politicized Supreme Court), containment's detractors were sitting in power as a new threat manifested itself. Arguably, the best solution to 9/11 would have been to marginalize Osama et al and embrace the peace-loving family-oriented middle ground of most people in the Arab world (contain the threat). In a sad coincidence, political expediency and bad scholarship coincided to eschew this path and go on an all out offensive. The problem with this path, obviously, is that it creates more enemies than friends. Furthermore, the threat itself was never as serious as Soviet Russia. So now, we are left with an administration in the awkward position of elevating a weak threat that should have been contained because the current administration is philosophically opposed to containment in any form.

“We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.”

“We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty, when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner Freedom Now they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.”

[note: there are many other oblique references to God in the speech, you can check out the whole speech here]

- Can God be all-powerful and NOT mysterious? The God of Bush’s speech is inexorably wound up in the practical day-to-day of this badly malfunctioning earth. She is the Author of Liberty, the guide of history, and the moral weight behind our country. This is hardly a new conception of God. But, responsible people who invoke God in this way have almost categorically (across all religions) invoked the idea that God is mysterious and we cannot definitively know what He wants. Absent this, God becomes merely a reflection of the will of historically and currently powerful people. Such a God is no God at all, merely an instrument of tyranny. Using God to justify the will of the powerful is not new, but it remains loathsome and it cheapens the faith of truly religious people everywhere.

I hate Curt Schilling's politics....

...but I like the jersey. Here's a link to the interview (video is from Best Damn Sports Show...Tom Arnold is a clown).

Eat your heart out Green Bay

Here's an article about the astronomically high ratings in Pittsburgh for last weeks game. The mayor has also declared tomorrow a "Black and Gold" day.

Robespierre started as a law student

Whaaaa? No more livery of seisen jokes?

Here is an email from the International Law Society, which is obviously happy with the proposed changes:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last week, the faculty approved the introduction of a 1L elective in the spring semester beginning with the Class of 2008. Instead of having all students take Property, students will be able to choose between a handful of courses, including Property, Constitutional Law, Corporations, Tax, and International Law.
The elective is the hard-fought end to a Law Students for Human Rights campaign started two years ago in
collaboration with the International Law Society to provide some students with the option of training in public international law before their first summer. Last year, over two hundred students signed a petition that such an elective should be introduced. In response, the Dean commissioned a Special Committee to consider the proposal.

The Special Committee eventually agreed that singling out International Law as the only elective was unjustified. It recommended that a core group of courses be offered so that students could choose a subject consistent with their interests, helpful to developing a note topic, or relevant to their prospective summer work. Because these electives will still be taught in 1L sections, subject to the mandatory curve, and capped at around 110, it remains to be seen whether administration of the elective will not lead to other problems. Nevertheless, we welcome the elective option as a whole and sincerely appreciate the commitment to student agency.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I must say, its interesting. But I can't see how Property was deemed less essential than Administrative Law, which (I'm assuming) remains a required 1L course here.

OUCH!

Jets fans may have a claim to being as long-suffering as Red Sox Nation. Eating dinner at Katz's last night (in full Steelers regalia), I got to enjoy maniacal mutterings- "Steelers Suck!" and long, hate-filled silent stares.

Here's the thing... the Jets could have won the game, obviously. But that doesn't mean they should have won. Neither team played that well, but the Steelers put together better drives and actually managed to score two OFFENSIVE touchdowns. It was a great game, but part of what made it a great game is that the more deserving team won. Interceptions and punt returns ought not be enough to win a game in the NFL playoffs.

Now, here's what's really going to piss off the Jets fans- this game was GREAT for the Steelers next week. Roethlisberger got to make mistakes and still come out alive, the secondary stepped up, AND now they don't have to be the undisputed favorite in whatever game they have to play.

One thing to like about Ohio...

Here's a story about the humble and loving Roethlisberger family. I've been enjoying wearing my #7 jersey all over the city this week. I've never been so proudly on a bandwagon before.

"Plastics"

Is there a mutual fund that will invest in the ponzi scheme that is social security privitization, which (as a young American), I support. Can I diagram that sentence? Do I add a "question mark" at any point of the first sentence? If so, how?

My Criminal Procedure Prof is da BOMB!

We'll miss him here at NYU. But I'm sure he's going to do good things at his new job. Congratulations to Prof. Schaffer.

White Man's Burden

Would the real Nazis please stand up?

A couple of observations:

1) I am going to host a "Colonizer-Colonized" party before I leave law school

2) Most American 20-year-olds don't even know who Rommel is

3) Forcing ANYONE to go to Auschwitz is cruel and bizarre. I hate holocaust tourism. I went to Thereseinstadt when I was 16 w/ a Jewish youth group. Our bastard tour guide had the nerve to reach in to the ovens and smear ashes on his forehead saying, "this is the only way I truly feel the pain of our people." I threw up. That is just sick and wrong and symptomatic of a culture as obsessed with death as the Nazis. There should be no holocaust tourism, the places should be open to the public and allowed to rot back into the earth. Think of how insane it is that we maintain these sites. I'm not even going to mention the atrociously gaudy "art" memorials that one is forced to ponder at these sites. I loved Krakow, I spent 5 days there a couple summers ago....I didn't once consider making the 20 minute trip to Auschwitz. I think its pathetic and wrong that I have to explain this decision to anyone. "We must never forget" is dogma, and rightfully so....I'll admit that. But why must society constantly pander to the lowest common denominator when trying to follow through with such dictates.

4) Prince Harry may be stupid, but Price Phillip (pictured, top left) is stupider.

The O.C.

Peter Gallagher singing on The O.C. was truly surreal. It was like watching a David Lynch movie. He is my new favorite Tuftonian.

Here is a great article that argues that Walsh/non-Walsh tension drove 90210. The O.C. is an entirely different creature- a long fantasy of California-ism...each character riding his own impossible wave of avocados and alternative family structures. I would really be interested in the Author's opinion regarding The O.C.'s hyper-self-consciousness. I'm sure it makes total "sense" to someone who came up in academia during the heady acme of post-modernism that was the early 1990s. But, has such self-referentialism become so banal that it just doesn't matter any more? Or, is it the only way we know how to communicate to one-another? All I know is that they really need to do an homage to "Donna Martin Graduate!" I also enjoyed the Keystone Cops on today's episode.

Booker and Fanfan

Here's a good place to start if you're interested in this.

Frankly, the whole thing makes me kind of ill. First, imagine how bad it sucks to be sentenced yesterday. Second, after everyone involved in this debate bitched and moaned all summer long about how confusing everything associated with Blakely was, SCOTUS speaks with six separate opinions based on two separate 5-4 splits over 118 pages. What a joke. I'm sorry, but this stinks of intellectual copouts, silly theoretical infighting, and a total refusal to operate in the real world.

I remember back in elementary and high school when I thought the Supreme Court was noble and functional. Do kids still feel that way? Or did everyone get the picture after Bush v. Gore?

Dear Gawker: SUCK IT

Woah sister, don't go there. I'm taking this personally.

Let me first say, I don't sign petitions regarding shoes. I did, however, sign petitions for the release of Once Upon a Time in the West and Brain Candy on DVD. That's as far as I'll go in terms of pop culture petionery.

As for hipsterdom, and as a self-anointed "slack-jawed hipster yokel," let me point out that I sense a foul smell wafting towards me from Gawker's general direction. It is the heavy stench of a crusted-over pot in a clogged Lower East Side sink calling a funky lime-green undersized kettle in Williamsburg black.

Give it up! Is there a lamer or more pathetically transparent New York affectation than making fun of hipsters? Come on. What's the movie where the teenage girl says, "I want to be different just like everyone else." OH, wait. That's EVERY freaking teenage movie.

The problem with America today, and probably the only thing that holds us all together as a coherent culture, is that everyone wants to eat their cake and have it too. In morally coherent societies, this is a shameful impulse. In America, we worship it.

So, Gawker, you shouldn't drop pop culture references like the alien taco Nagix on South Park shits ice cream cones and then criticize a bunch of dorky teenagers for signing a petition to get shoes from a movie they like as "blind sheep." Your business is blind-sheppery. And just cause you can't always be the Blind Sheep in Chief doesn't mean you should lash out. EVERYONE IN NEW YORK REALIZED THAT UGGS WERE LAME AND STUPID AT THE SAME TIME AS YOU.

Wes Anderson isn't playing your silly game, AND he's winning. So don't be bitter. Its very unbecoming. I don't even understand your argument. I mean, I'm sure Wes Anderson wouldn't be caught dead in a pair Zissou Adidas even if he made millions of dollars off them. Who's the tastemaker? Who's the tastemakee? Are they in an inter-locking death spiral? Can you control the forces that made you? Is that a shark? Are you jumping it?

Baby Steps

I know this is rather base, only interesting to myself, and no way to start posting again; but, I just had to share the exciting new keyword searches that have (mis)led surfers to my page. No need to mention "Zissou Adidas," which is the mainstay of my non-friend traffic and constantly ranks first.

1) "Lacy Peterson's Ghost"... I'm intrigued, tell me more.

2) "Red Light District Tokyo" ... I wish I could be of more help on this front...although this reminded me of an email I sent to a friend visiting Amsterdam over break (I worked in Holland this summer)... I was going to post it as a helpful guide to those visiting A-Dam...but then I re-read it an realized it was highly incriminating. I will say two things 1) Benjimins Fallafel (behind and to the side of the Palace, off of Dam Square) is the best fallafel in the world and 2) Cafe De Kuil is the best coffeeshop in town.

3) "Shavondah".... YES! I really was hoping to get some ______ (what is the word that bloggers would use here, I think bowlers would say "pin action") on my Real World post.