Spoiler Alert: 24: Day 7

I don't want to ruin anything for those 24 fans out there, but if you want a clue about what's in store next season, check out the sentiment I quoted in an older blog post.

I'm bummed this surprise was ruined for me by the interwebs (totally by accident, I did not seek out the info), so I don't want to spoil it for anyone else.

But let's just say the writers on the show are pushing the limits of plausibility, more so than they have before. Let's just hope they don't take the same bad turn the X-Files did toward the end there.

Old School Pic of the Day (3)

It's a two-fer, since I gots to represent both of these dolls!


Here's Jess, doing what she can to get impregnated by Ben Harper in 1998. Oww!


Here's Mark in 1996. The inspiration behind this photo (and there's a series of them somewhere) was "poses with ice blendeds in the style of graduation photos."

I've been saying "woo hoo" a lot.

I will try to think of a clever alternative for future posts. Thanks for reading!

Score!

Soooo, a very happy thing happened this afternoon:

I've mentioned before how I take the bus from school, on occasion... I also carpool with a friend from class (bless her heart), which usually saves me from driving and parking in a visitor lot that costs $8/day. The bus is free, but you do have to deal with "The Great Unwashed." I like to think of myself as "one of the people," but I will confess that a girl has to have limits.

Before school started, there was a lottery for the option to purchase parking permits for a parking lot right near school. There's not enough space to accomodate everyone so they had to limit the number of people who could buy spots to about 50 (out of 160 in our class).

Sadly, I was not picked in the lottery (hence the bus and carpooling). But, I heard through the grapevine that at some point during the semester they would sell more decals - I think they didn't want to oversell the spots in the beginning and then have a parking morass. So, I remembered today that it was supposed to be "around the end of September, beginning of October" when they might make more passes available.

I called them up, and sho nuff they had some passes for sale, and I went down there and bought one. WOO HOO! Now when I need to stay at the library until 2am I don't have to worry about taking a bus (just kidding, not sure that I ever want to stay that late). But no more $8/day to park! In the interest of full disclosure, I should let y'all know how awesome my parents are: they gave me a check that I could use in the event the pass became available!! I'm so spoiled, in so many ways.

Bush signed the school loan legislation bill

Good news for once!

The legislation boosts the maximum Pell grant, which goes to the poorest college students, from $4,310 a year to $5,400 a year by 2012.

It also cuts in half the interest rates on federally backed student loans — from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent — over the next four years.

Read the full story here.

"This will blow your effing mind."

That's the little gem my crazy professor said yesterday, which was in reference to "choice of law" provisions in state laws.

My professor explained "choice of law" provisions thusly: let's say you get in a car accident in AZ but want to sue the person in CA. The laws in CA might allow you to sue someone for an accident that occurred out of state, but under the condition that the Arizona laws that apply to car accidents are those that are used in the suit, since that's where the accident occurred. This could be a good thing if you are the defendant and you know AZ law will be better for you. (BTW, I have no idea if this is how it works in CA - I'm just making it up to explain it.)

So, mind blown? I totally love his enthusiasm but sometimes I wonder, wtf? And, I'm relishing the day when he drops the F-bomb for real! It's bound to happen at some point!

Project Runway 4

... premieres November 14! Woo hoo!

Finally!

I'm here at school and sitting near the HOTTEST guy ever. He's a law student and I'm not sure what year he is. He just said he does yoga. I think he's a second year student from what he's saying. Wowsa. He looks like a cross between Joaquin and Keanu. Sweet baby jesus.

Clarification: He has Joaquin's eyes and Keanu's face. He brought his own home-made lunch to school. He just left. Sigh.

Google's answer to Second Life?

There's a rumor on the interwebs about a new project Google is testing - something called "My World".

Based on the rumor mill, it sounds like it might be an interactive tool - something like a virtual version of your "first" life.

On a side note, I didn't know there was so much collaboration between Google and ASU (that surprised me)... but our school email is served up through Gmail, which I thought was cool.

Anyhoo, there you go.

We knew this one was coming.

Kiefer gets a DUI.

Old School Pic of the Day (2)

Seth. 1995. I think he was 19 here. Hot, yeah?

BTW, what happened to those nice days when the boys wore funky shirts from thrift stores and rocked the side burns? I miss those days.

Franky kills me.

I turned the A/C off for a bit.

I'm happy to report that it's only 84 degrees here and I was able to turn off the A/C and open the sliding glass window.

Little bubba is enjoying the fresh air and the sounds of the birdies!

Lemon Grass Thai Cafe

I just found my first yummy thai restaurant! Woo-hoo!

My Legal Writing professor recommend Lemon Grass as a good place to get a delicious and cheap thai meal. So, a friend from class and I checked it out last night and both really liked it!

We split yellow curry with chicken (I order this at every thai restaurant I go to. I should branch out but me likey too much) and a chicken with cashews dish, which even made with mild seasonings still had a nice kick.

The thai iced tea was yummo too, but really it takes some effort to make coconut milk and sweet tea taste bad, yes?

Here is a detailed review from Chowhound. Sooo for you out-of-towners, when you come visit me, I can take you to a yummy thai place! Yay!

Clip from The Darjeeling Limited

Old School Pic of the Day

The list of ways I can procrastinate grows!

Fun with scanning: here's a pic from nearly 10 years ago. I can't believe it's been close to 10 years since we took this photo.



I envied K's blue peacoat so much back then. Still do.

More to come!

Jakob at the dentist

This was too cute not to steal and post. Jakob had his first dentist visit. What a cutie!

Baseball game's off!

Well, because of a double-whammy in the form of a midterm exam in Contracts on Monday coinciding with our research paper being due on the same day, our outing to the baseball game is off! Too many people backed out at the last minute which means that we don't qualify for those cheap $10 tix. I was actually getting excited about going!

It's probably a good thing that I won't have a major distraction over the weekend. It looks like it will be a busy one full of studying and editing. I'll have to be very studious on Saturday so that I can go to a movie/drink at home alone on Sunday. Ha!

PS: A few friends from school discovered my nickname "Bexy," and its origin. Here's another clip.

I'm going to a baseball game on Saturday.

As most of you know, I am not a sports fan, don't know anything about professional sports, and typically do not participate in any sports (why sweat when you don't have to?).

But, a classmate has secured discount tix to this Saturday's baseball game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the L.A. Dodgers so I decided to check it out. It's only $10, some friends from class will be there, and I like spending $6 for a plastic cup full of Budweiser (kidding).

Ramon, I'll be secretly cheering for your boys from L.A.

New Wes Anderson commercials

If you haven't seen the spot he did for American Express, why not? It's lovely.

I just came across a new trio of ads he's made for AT&T, which you can view here.

His new film, The Darjeeling Limited opens in a few weeks. I'm happy to report that I found a Wes Anderson fan at law school and we are planning to check this out if/when it comes to the PHX area!

Project Phin: Saving the environment in 6 webisodes

The Bakkens told me their friend Marcus Dunstan filmed a series of eco-friendly (and pretty funny) shorts for the site Clean My Ride. Apparently, he got the gig through Chris Moore, who produced the show Project Greenlight (that's why you might see Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, etc. in these).

Here's the first installment... and I highly recommend checking out the rest!

Practicing law in Second Life

This week the law school hosted a lecture by Connie Mableson, an intellectual property attorney with the Phoenix law firm Dodge Anderson. Ms. Mableson was rated "the best IP attorney in Arizona in 2005" - and she is the first lawyer to have an IP practice inside Second Life.

Her lecture was called "Legal Issues in Virtual Worlds" and it was fascinating! She mostly spoke about Second Life and how, given the nature of the site, there are a number of very real-world lawsuits arising from these virtual interactions.

Did you know that millions of dollars change hands in Second Life? You can buy and sell lots of things - from the mundane (clothes, drinks) to the taboo (slave labor). As pointed out in this blog, Second Life can provide a way to commit crimes against other users (theft, fraud, copyright infringement) and because real money is changing hands, there are real-life implications to these "virtual" exchanges. How the law will be applied, used, and possibly adapted to these lawsuits are open questions. For example, can a user who lives in California sue a user in Japan? They both met in the Second Life platform, but they were physically in different areas of the world when the dispute arose.

Another example: say you meet a virtual partner in Second Life and you decide to buy some land together. You decide to have a baby together, an avatar baby (seriously, check it out). Then one day you and your partner have a fight and want to split up. How is the property split? Who "owns" the baby? Would you "share custody" of the avatar?

Because Linden Labs allows users to retain the copyright to the items they create "in-world," the result is that the user owns the items they create and can protect that ownership in the real world (for example, you can register the copyright to these virtual items). Ms. Mableson said there is no "in-world" forum for settling legal disputes but people are talking about it and trying to figure out how to set one up.

The law school's Lodestar Dispute Resolution Program plans to collaborate with the Center for Law, Science and Technology to open up a mediation/arbitration clinic in Second Life. Not sure when that might happen but I hope to learn more about it soon! (By the way, a "clinic" is like a law office but it offers free services to the community and is run by students who are supervised by attorneys.)

Her lecture definitely got me more excited about working in the area of copyright and the web... lots of interesting things are on the horizon, which I hope will lead to lots of interesting job opportunities!

Loving the HH

Heather Havrilesky is hilarious (that's a lot of H's). Her column "I Like to Watch" gets me through the week, seriously.

She had the occasion to watch "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style" (as did I) and here is a snippet from her review:

And even when [Tim Gunn's] being kind of spongy and weird, when he's looking at a really bad pair of jeans with an awful cut that makes your ass look like an armchair, even when he's searching for the right words to describe just how wrong those jeans look, flipping through the many, many words in his enormous vocabulary, even then, he's filled with love and empathy. Even when he thinks you're tacky and, quite frankly, gross, he gets away with it, because he also wants what's best for you, he believes in you, and he just knows that you're going to make it work, somehow, some way!

She is so right, as usual. Love her (and I LOVE Tim Gunn too, btw)!

More on the school loan legislation

The L.A. Times has an update on the education bill I mentioned in an earlier post.

Congress has passed the bill, and W rescinded his veto threat! This may actually go through!

By cutting incentives the government had been paying to lenders, the government can shift the funds directly to students. They will be raising the Pell Grant amount (not that I could get my hands on that anyway) and they are going to forgive government-issued student loans for graduates that work in the public sector or in "high-need" schools. The part that will benefit me is the interest rate reduction - which will reduce the rate from 6.8% down to 3.4% over the next several years. This is great news and means I could end up saving several thousand dollars in interest when all is said and done (if my math is right, and it might not be...)!

Crossing my fingers and knocking on wood....

Polar Bears in trouble

I could be PMSing, but this is so sad. "Two-thirds of the world's polar bear population could be gone by midcentury if predictions of melting sea ice hold true, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Friday," this article begins.

"Disaster Capitalism"

Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is releasing soon.

Here is a snippet from a longer excerpt:

I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government.

Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages.

By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.

3:10 to Yuma!

I loved this movie! I'm not one for westerns - they never interested me. But I love Christian Bale and Russell Crowe (Bale, more, given his incredible range - anyone who can pull off American Psycho, The Machinist, and Batman in one career is impressive in my book).

Both of them are so good in this film... it's suspenseful and emotional (maybe I'm just emotional these days?) and the cast is great:

Peter Fonda
Ben Foster (one of Claire's creepy boyfriends on Six Feet Under)
Luke Wilson, who was probably phoning it in, admittedly
Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly)
Gretchen Mol...

Anyhoo, the trailer's here. Life was really hard for those early Arizonans.

Latte Art

Thought this little video was fun...

Last one for today: The new fall TV lineup

Seriously, wtf.

Yahoo is hailing the Caveman show - you know, the one based on the Geico commercial - as a new show "you have to see."

Geekwatch: iPhone price cut controversy

So you may have heard about yesterday's announcement from Apple, which, among other things, included the introduction of a newer, cheaper model of iPhone - a mere two months after its first release. Well, some of those "early adopters" were angered by the price drop and today Apple decided to offer them a $100 store credit as a thank-you for their early support of the product. Aww, shucks. $399 is still too much for me, sadly. The little suckers are gorgeous and cool, but I can wait.

Breaking: "Wachowski probably still a dude"

So, I let the interwebs' gossip mill get the best of me, possibly. The Joel Silver mafia went on the counter-attack in response to reports that Larry became Lana. It may be bullshit after all.

It's Ms. Wachowski now

Many moons ago, I heard through a reliable source some interesting news. It looks like the cat's now out of the bag (so to speak?):

Larry Wachowski, co-director of The Matrix, is now a woman. Yup. She is Lana Wachowski now. I'm not shitting you.

This made me laugh...

...not sure why.

"Boy, 9, 'bored' by college"

Things that are helping me

Hey everyone...

So, while law school is tough, and there's a lot of reading, and the concepts are sometimes hard to grasp (nevermind remember, case-to-case), I'm trying to be zen. I have to - I don't want to end up getting sick or getting migraines. Some of you know about my ordeals with migraines!

Here are some things that I'm sooooo happy exist in my world:

1) Friends and family, of course!!
2) Peet's coffee
3) Blogging - both my own and reading other blogs!
4) Podcasts - especially downtempo podcasts!!!!
------ Cary's Podcasts
------ Dave's Lounge
------ Morning Becomes Eclectic
------ Tempo of the Down
------ Soilsound Chronicles
5) Defamer
6) Heather Havrilesky specifically, and Salon generally
7) TiVo & Netflix
8) Food Network
9) Cheap Southwest flights from Phoenix to Burbank
10) Air conditioning.

I'm sure there's more... but really, with all of this life is pretty damn good.