October 22, 2006
And what would your community service project look like? ::
legal — tagged boyscouts, copyright, legal, news and weird
4:45 pm
Only in LA. On Saturday, Slate’s Today’s Papers had this to say about a new merit badge being offered to Boy Scouts in Los Angeles (check the last paragraph of the story):
The LAT reports that Los Angeles-area Boy Scouts—perhaps those who would rather not learn the finer points of wilderness survival—can earn a new badge being offered in conjunction with the Motion Picture Association of America, the movie industry’s lobbying group. The “Respect Copyrights Activity” badge features the copyright “C” symbol, a film reel, and musical notes. A mom’s take: “This one is tailor-made for the city boy in L.A.” As long as the L.A. city boy is an aspiring studio hack.
Unfortunately, there was no link to the LA Times story when I last checked. I’d love some substantiation of this story, so if anyone knows of anything, send it along?
September 24, 2006
Vermonters secede! ::
vermont — tagged history, politics, secession, vermont and weird
8:36 pm
The LA Times has an article about the Vermont secession movement (NB: I, like 92 percent of those polled in the state, do not support it). Overall the article is ok, though its general tone is a little glib. And the two main problems I found? The article refers to the Ethan Allen Institute as a “non-partisan” think tank. However, for anyone who pays any attention at all to politics in the state, the EAI is famous (or infamous) as a group of conservative free-market zealots. So sure, they may be non-partisan, but who do you think they support come election time? Certainly not the party that advocates for single-payer healthcare.
Secondly I noted something about the leader of the Second Vermont Republic, Thomas Naylor. According to the LA Times piece, Naylor grew quite wealthy after running an software company early in the PC era. (His bio substantiates that he did work in tech, but didn’t mention that he might have gotten rich off it.) But now Naylor spends much of his intellectual efforts (when he’s not defending holocaust-questioning anti-semites) railing against the economic systems and cultural phenomena that made him rich and allowed him to pursue his ongoing political ends. Note particularly his complaints in the Technofascist Manifesto (whatever that may be), e.g., Article 1, entitled “Affluenza,” in which he asks some unnamed vaguely defined body of robot citizens to “[t]each me how to be a moneymaking, money spending machine.” Then in Article 2, “Technomania, he longs to “[m]ake high-tech mountains out of low-tech molehills.” And then my two favorites, Articles 3 and 4, in which he complains of the Internet: “our information, communication trade, and entertainment medium of choice – is a wellspring from which money, meaning, power, and instant gratification flow.” (Please note, I found all this on the Vermont Republic’s website.) And finally, of course, the general complaint in Article 4 that we Americans are under the minstaken belief that “[b]igger and faster make better.” So there is clearly some dissonance between Naylor’s professed beliefs and the reality of his life.
For me, I’m really not even interested in debating the merits of the argument that Vermont should secede. In fact, I have to work hard not to dismiss the argument out of hand, because I just can’t get past the stark hypocracy of the movement’s leader.
September 15, 2006
Google + TOR = fun new searches! ::
tech — tagged anonymous, google, tech, TOR, totally stumped and weird
10:19 am
Google when using TOR
Originally uploaded by gjs.
Yes, fun new searches that don’t make any sense, unless you understand German, Italian or French. There are work-arounds, of course, but the whole world of Web anonymization does take some getting used to. Here’s my favorite passage from the Wiki FAQ:
If you really want to see Google in English you can click the link [on the search results page] that provides that. But we consider this a feature with Tor, not a bug—the Internet is not flat, and it in fact does look different depending on where you are. This feature reminds people of this fact.
So there.
Slate on that weird 9/11 photo ::
photos — tagged photos, social conscience and weird
10:00 am
Slate has an article written by the photographer who took that creepy photograph of young hipsters who appeared to be relaxing on the Brooklyn waterfront on 9/11 (the photo is included in the story). The photographer’s commentary particularly piqued my interest:
Four and a half years later, when I was going through my archive to assemble a retrospective exhibition of my work from more than 50 years, the color slide from Brooklyn suddenly seemed to jump at me. Now, distanced from the actual event, the picture seemed strange and surreal. It asked questions but provided no answers.
For me, the photo screamed cynicism, to a degree that was nearly unbearable. The photographer noted that as well. But at the end of it all, we really don’t know at all what was going on—the appearance of not caring could simply be an illusion. Ultimately, I think the photograph reveals one of the great shortcomings of visual media, rather than of people roughly my age.
June 15, 2006
Morlocks, Eloi, and the impotently angry: a day of bar review ::
personal — tagged bar study and weird
9:18 pm
I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve stepped up my bar review efforts in the past few days, but I’ve become increasingly intrigued by the long, sometimes convoluted narratives the bar examiners develop for the test. On two separate occasions, lecturers have suggested that the examiners are on illegal drugs when they write these questions; one lecturer suggested they were on LSD, while today’s lecturer insisted it was cocaine. No matter the drug, the end results are sometimes interesting, sometimes downright nutty.
Here’s a particularly good example. One question involved a woman who owned two dogs that barked constantly while she was away at work all day. In a not-too-veiled reference to the Time Machine, the woman’s next door neighbor, Morlock (yeah, that’s right), worked at nights and slept during the day. The dogs’ incessant barking drove him to madness, during which he “came to her front door with a tape recorder and an electrically amplified bullhorn. He started playing a tape of the dogs barking putting it at full volume and amplifying it with the bullhorn” [emphasis added]. This of course causes the woman (whose first name is Wanda and whose last name just has to be Eloi) to freak out, slamming the door in Morlock’s face. And of course, this being a torts question, “[t]he door struck the bullhorn and jammed it against Morlock’s face, knocking out two of his teeth.” Youch.
At times the examiners approach something approaching humor. For example, while describing an altercation between two boaters, one examiner wrote about the first boater “rais[ing] his middle finger in the timeworn salute of the impotently angry and shout[ing] a few well-chosen references to [the other boater’s] anatomy and ancestry.” Of course, I just want to know what, exactly, such a “well chosen reference” might be, that can taking into account both anatomy and ancestry.
More generally, I think all this suggests I should get out more.
June 13, 2006
I am not a leper ::
weird, personal — tagged bar study and weird
2:37 pm
I had no idea that, in the world of defamation, a plaintiff had an automatic right to damages if the she is able to show the defendant (inaccurately) asserted to a third party that the plaintiff suffered from a legally recognized “loathsome disease.” Here, by loathsome disease, I mean a disease that would cause people to generally think less of the plaintiff. What’s particularly weird about this is that there are two such recognized diseases: one is “venereal disease” and the other? You guessed it: leprosy.
I write this just to let you know that I am not a leper. [Update: oh, and you shouldn’t infer that I have a venereal disease, either. Because I don’t.]
May 24, 2006
Yes, they really make you study that ::
personal — tagged bar study, the simpsons and weird
3:59 pm
One of the weird aspects of bar review is the obsessive coverage of areas of law that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual practice of law in the real world. One such area, which we covered today, was the area of common law crimes. (For the uninitiated, these are crimes that were created by the courts rather than by statute. Why is this obscure? Because in every state in this country, all crimes are defined by statute.) Why do the bar review people do this? According to the man on the video tape, it’s because each state has its own peculiar version of the criminal statutes, so you can’t really have a multi-state review of, say, the law of murder, by studying some particular murder statute. If you’re thinking about how absurd this is, I am with you.
In any event, I just spent two and a half hours reviewing common law crimes, and the only thing that kept going through my head is that episode of The Simpsons in which Bart calls 911, is placed into an unworkably complex automated voice mail service, and, in an act of utter frustration mashes the key pad. The response? “You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press one.”
I’m not sure what I’m going to do if the rest of my summer is going to be like this. All of the classes may be boring, but at least I’ll be entertained in my mind.
February 28, 2006
Med students + lawyer + King Kong remake = ha! ::
weird — tagged king kong, laboratorium, movies and weird
10:53 am
Dude:
[W]atching a movie such as this with a bunch of medical students is an interesting experience. The anatomy chatter was almost nonstop, especially for a movie with this many skulls. Also, falling from the top of the Empire State Building should have splattered any living creature that large, Ann Darrow must have no pain or temperature nerve fibers, and one of our company thought that she saw testicles on the dinosaurs. For my part, I noted that after Kong’s rampage, Carl Denham is going to be facing some pretty serious tort liabilty.
The funniest parts are bolded for easy reference.
October 16, 2005
What happens when protests turn fun in Vemont ::
vermont — tagged politics, vermont and weird
10:31 pm
Up in the town of Derby Line, Vermont today, demonstrators on both the Vermont and Canadian sides of the border turned out to protest the presence of the Minutemen, that group of anti-immigrant do-gooders who patrol US borders for “illegal activity.” Apparently, the Minutemen stopped in town to make sure our Canadian neighbors weren’t trying anything funny. The police were there, of course, to be sure the protest stayed orderly. Then this happened:
The groups began kicking a ball back and forth across the border, a game that concluded when a Vermont state trooper took the ball away.
Who knows if people just went home after the police seized that ball. But the article implies that they did.
June 24, 2005
And the final word ::
weird — tagged autoracing and weird
12:18 am
The final word in favor of mindless male domination of automotive racing goes to Bernie Ecclestone, the head of Formula One racing, who was able to get the following throw-away line into an interview with Sports Illustrated:
He told Autosport racing magazine in 2000 that women could not compete in Formula One, but if one did, “she would have to be a woman who was blowing away the boys. ... What I would really like to see happen is to find the right girl, perhaps a black girl with super looks, preferably Jewish or Muslim, who speaks Spanish.”
Mind you, this was after he reiterated his contention that “[w]omen should be all dressed in white like all other domestic appliances” to Danica Patrick, the first superstar of Indy racing in who knows how long. Could it be that Danica Patrick’s success has fundamentally changed the gender dynamic of automotive racing? Judging by what seems to be the media’s newfound discovery that Ecclestone is certifiably insane, I certainly think so.
