Hate speech

I’ve been closely following the uproar in the Islamic world since the publishing of the cartoons in the Danish newspapers, and today, things reached a new level on my absurdity meter.

For any who haven’t followed the story or who need a brush up on the details, a Danish newspaper tried to open up a local dialogue about how Islam was portrayed in the media. Danish cartoonists were to submit their cartoons, and the newspaper picked a few dozen to showcase in a special section of the newspaper.

Well, one cartoon depicted the prophet Mohammed, only instead of a turban on his head, the cartoonist drew a bomb.

Reaction was swift and harsh. While virtually no protest emerged from the Muslim community in Denmark, all across the Middle East and the Philippines protests erupted in an orgy of property destruction, murders, and disorder. Danish flags were burned by the hundreds. Danish goods were removed from store shelves in Egypt. The Philippines demanded an apology from the Danish government (which gave in and apologized for the actions of a wholly unrelated private newspaper). Danes living in Libya had their homes burned to the ground, and many fled the country.

Well, today in Syria, angry mobs burned down several embassies (the Danish embassy only one among several).

Seriously, people, get a thicker skin. I know I’m a bit of a complainer, but even I don’t create imagined slights this grotesque and react so ridiculously to them.

The debate on the BBC website forums seems to center around basically two positions:
Freedom of speech v. Respect for others

Now, far be it from me to suggest that the ‘respect for others’ camp is ludicrous, but when I wish to point out the foibles of others I can do so in mild jest. Those in the ‘respect for others’ camp seem to be eschewing the mild jest in favor of murder and arson, which clearly show lots of respect for others (whose only crime is coming from the same country as unrelated corporate enterprises).

This discussion is not foreign to the United States, even. In my Law and Human Rights class last semester, the professor of the class-s-s-s-s-s-s-s had us discussing hate speech laws-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s. I said that the idea of hate speech laws ran counter to the concept of freedom of speech and the primary experiment of the United States (freedom of expression and thought).

John Stuart Mill made the most convincing case for freedom of speech I’ve yet read, and he suggested that freedom of thought was necessary because it made all men arrive at truth more quickly than otherwise.

He claimed that if a man says something contrary to your beliefs, there were three possibilities: Either 1) the opposing party is clearly wrong, which gets you closer to understanding truth because you have been able to rule out one proposition from being true, or 2) the opposing party is right, in which case you get closer to truth by abandoning your false belief, or 3) both parties have bits of truth and bits of falsity, in which case both parties benefit by refining their beliefs to eliminate the falsities. Indeed, in a most prescient opinion, Justice Holmes suggested the same idea with much eloquence in a dissent. “But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.” Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919).

After relating this concept (which is commonly called “the marketplace of ideas”), the professor dismissed the entire argument by suggesting that it is only made by people who faced no oppression, and then pointed out that in this case, it was being made by a middle-class white male (me) in one of the most privileged countries in the world.

Now, aside from the impropriety of a professor engaging in purely ad hominem attacks against one of his students, the allegation is patently untrue. J.S. Mill faced persecution for his writings, and many of the Utilitarians and market-philosophers who followed in his footsteps have been vilified. It was only after getting the ideas enshrined in American jurisprudence (mid-20th century) that the utility of the marketplace of ideas has become widely accepted.

What’s more to the point, though, is the sheer arrogance of those who would do away with the marketplace of ideas in favor of a restrictive system of speech in which only the orthodox speech is tolerated. J.S. Mill’s “marketplace of ideas” is premised on the idea that, however deeply I hold me beliefs, I may be wrong! Because of that chance that my belief in a ‘fighting faith’ could be wrong, I must take into account the arguments of others to ensure that I am as right as I can be.

No such obligation is imposed on those who believe that they have already found ultimate truth, and in no place is this more apparent than in those who would silence opposition to their version of reality. There is a certain uplifting humility in recognizing that you could be wrong, and an abrading type of arrogance in the assumption that you have discovered absolute truth and have captured it perfectly in every nuance and complexity.

If the Muslim nations of the world wish to survive the next few hundred years without facing a Samuel Huntington-style “Clash of Civilizations” World War, they must give up the supreme arrogance of believing that they alone have understood truth it all its vagaries and learn to bear mild criticism as a way of getting closer to understanding Truth.

*EDIT (12:15 am, 2/5/06): And the escalation further mounts... Denmark and Norway have asked their citizens to leave Syria after the burning of their embassies. Chile and Sweden have not yet responded to the burnings (which damaged their embassies).

*EDIT (9:35 am, 2/5/06): As goes Damascus, so goes Beirut. An angry mob in Lebanon burned down the Danish embassy, too.

Creepy neighbors

I haven't really met many of my neighbors, and that is something that worries me just a little bit. I know that my apartment complex attracts many people who wouldn't make it into a lot of other complexes because of the low qualifications to live there and the excessively cheap rent (which I now believe is so low not to attract students but because that is the highest their clientele can afford/are willing to pay for housing). I like to know who my neighbors are, as a general rule, because you never know when you might need to borrow an egg, a cup of sugar, or the like. Also, it makes the community a lot safer when your neighbor cares enough to call 911 when he sees someone strange entering your home in the middle of the daytime or something.

The problem is that my neighbors seem to be a little on the creepy side. I'm sure I'm probably a little creepy myself, but these people push the envelope.

There are two girls that live in the apartment next to mine. Here, I'm making a conscious decision to call them girls - and not women - because (when I think about choosing a word) I tend to reserve the more adult term for people who act semi-adult or better. The wild crazy beating of their music keeps me awake past when I retire a couple of nights a week, usually. And for no particular reason that I can understand, about once every other week, they have a screaming party. I know the walls are thin, and I could forgive one kind of screaming (human they are, still). But this seems to be a shrieking contest with laughter. One of them will let out a loud whoop and then there will be laughter, followed by a responding whoop from the other and more laughter. And this usually seems to happen on nights like tonight where they are having some kind of loud party next door with lots of people shouting and making loud noises.

As much as I might wish for some neighbors who were a bit more open to the possibility that some of us need to sleep by 3:00 am, I would take a hundred of them before another Creepy Guy. Creepy Guy seemed very nice when I first moved in. While I was carrying box after box to the apartment, a 50'ish-looking man stuck his head out of his apartment, introduced himself, and offered to help me carry things. I only had another couple boxes on that trip, so I politely refused and stopped to talk for a moment. He teaches school somewhere in Topeka (I never asked where or what grade/subject), and has a fiance who lives in the apartment right beneath him. He even offered me a cookie.

Now, he seems to be a chain smoker and stands outside his door on the balcony all the time, putting him in a prime place to stop and talk to neighbors as we come and go from our homes. When we talk, however, he brings up weird subjects. When he found out that I was a law student, that opened a Pandora's box it seems. He had lots of legal questions. He has some kind of contract dispute with the school he works for. He thinks his ex-wife might have stolen some of his stuff when she moved out. He has seen a homeless person going through our dumpster and wondered if that was okay or whether he should call the cops. He used to have been a trucker and injured his back while loading some crates and wanted to know if he could get paid for that.

I begged off answering his questions and told him that he should get an attorney to help him with his issues. Never one to miss an opportunity to talk up Washburn, I suggested that he give the Law Clinic a call and see if they might be able to help him with at least a few of his problems. When I offered to get the phone number for him, he said that he knew bunch of attorneys and that he would probably just go talk to one of them about it, since they give him free legal services due to their friendship.

As he talked about his friend attorneys, I slowly realized who he was talking about. The Phelps family. I'm not the sort to shy away from intellectual confrontation, but I'm not so much the type to initiate intellectual confrontation with people who are (for all intents and purposes here) still strangers. So I politely said 'uh-huh' and 'yeah' for a while as he talked, and then when we finished talking and I was starting to walk away, he offered to introduce me around to the Phelps family as a way of making contacts in Topeka (somehow, he thinks I'm from Iowa, and I'm not sure how he got that impression).

Things got a little awkward after that encounter. He keeps stopping me to talk, and it always gets a little weirder. He's stopped to talk to me about how "those damned Mexicans" are stealing jobs away from Americans (when I edged in that some were in fact here legally and others became naturalized citizens, he laughed derisively and said that was left-wing propaganda and that the legal ones were worse than the illegal ones, because then they insinuate their terrible "Mexican values" into our God-given American ones). He's told me about his love for Bill O'Reilly (he thinks the man "should run for President" and prays for him every night).

The weirdest one, though, was a few days back. He stopped me to talk again, while I was on my way to an evening class (so luckily I couldn't stop for long), and started lecturing me about how I should boycott NBC. He seemed pleased when I told him I usually don't watch NBC much anyway, but I asked him why I should boycott. He gripped my arm and stared me in the eyes, demanding how I couldn't have heard the awful and terrible news about "the gay agenda."

Wow. Hearing that shocked me almost as much as when I found out that a Kansas government official, when looking to rent office space in the mall one year, told the Capitol-journal in an interview that she was still in negotiations over the space and that she was trying to "jew down" the price a little. Seriously, who uses the term "gay agenda" anyway? What's next? A deep discussion about how there was no holocaust and how the "coloreds" (he's used that term before) are trying to steal away our pretty white women? Taking bets, people. Can he get creepier?

At that point, I told him I needed to get to class and left. There has got to be a way to go about my occasional coming and going without having this guy stop me to talk, and without turning to him one day and saying, "You know, I wish I could talk, but I'm in a hurry, and you're a jackass."

Now, honestly...

Today, in my Legislative Workshop class, we discussed the building of the Capitol building, its subsequent neglect and deterioration, and the current 2-decades old effort to restore it to its former glory. Some of the things that needed repair were pretty understandable...

There was cracking of the limestone sheathing on the building and new limestone needed to be put on to replace the old. Elevators needed to be brought up to code. Wiring needed to be buried in the walls as opposed to being open and running along the ceilings (the Capitol wasn't built when they had electricity, so when they put it in, they just never bothered to hide it).

Some things, though, boggled the mind. From the 6th floor on up to the top of the rotunda, objects were covered in graffiti. Yes, that's right. Thousands of the people who came to the Kansas Capitol building during the last century took the time out of their visit to our State's seat of government to deface the building. And a large percentage of the graffiti wasn't something simple like taking an ink-pen to the wall. In a frighteningly large number of cases, people carved their names or initials into the wals, staircases, and railings of the building.

In many cases, people even took the tour all the way to the very top of the capitol building to the tiny balcony at the very top of the rotunda (as I understand it you can't go up there anymore). While they were up taking in the sight of the skyline of Topeka, they hooked themselves into the railing, and leaned out over about 14 stories of empty air to carve their names into the outside of the dome. Apparently, it became like a contest to see who could carve their name farthest out on the dome.

When the workmen were trying to repair all of the carvings, they left the farthest out carving. It was a man by the name of Walter Niehaus, and he even provided his city too (St. Paul, MN). The officer in charge of the repairs looked up a St. Paul phone directory and sure enough, found a listing for Walter Niehaus. On a whim, he called up the person. An 87-year old man answered the phone.

Was this Walter Niehaus? It was. Had he ever been to Kansas? He had. Had he ever visited the Capitol building? Why, yes, he had, back right after he'd gotten back from WWII.

When he found out that the Kansas government wasn't asking for money to cover his desecration of our capitol building, he seemed more relaxed. What the officer wanted to know was how he'd gotten his name so far out from the balcony at the top of the capitol. Apparently, Mr. Niehaus worked with an operation that had wheat harvesters and traveled around the Midwest helping farmers cut their wheat. He and his associates had stopped in Topeka and visited the Capitol building. When they were at the top, they hooked four men together in a chain and dangled poor Walter out in the empty blue to carve all of their names, but he got scared after only finishing his own name so they hauled him back up.

Now, Kansas history doesn't usually interest me all that much, but this is the sort of trivia about our Capitol building that makes taking this class worthwhile.

Why little Johnny can't get his ball back when it bounces over the neighbor's fence...

I typically read the news every day from a half-dozen various news sites, and I occasionally find a story that strikes me as entertaining or of particular note. I rarely find stories that invoke my "Whosa-jigga-what-now?" reflex.

Sometimes things are just so absurd, though, that I have to re-read a story just to make sure I understand what happened. Today I found a story like that.

Apparently, the Department of Defense and Homeland Security decided that they needed to beef up security at some sensitive facilities around the United States. A prime facility was the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that handles nuclear material just outside of San Fransisco in a suburban area.

Now, the people that live in the homes (which are just on the other side of the street, mind you, not some goodly distance away) already have to live with the knowledge that radioactive materials are contained in a building only a few hundred yards away from their front doors. They are likely understandably not enthused about the whole situation. To allay their fears and to make the facility safer, the facility has new and improved security, including six-barrel Gatling machine guns, aimed outward, that fire over 50 rounds per second.

Yes, that's right, the government thought it was an awesome idea to aim guns usually associated with major combat operations directly out at people's homes in a suburban neighborhood. Am I the only person who finds the idea a little shocking and scary? I mean, protecting our nuclear facilities is surely important, but aren't there many just as effective methods (that might be cheaper) that don't involve the high probability of civilian death?

Minor annoyance

My jaw is killing me. My wisdom teeth are coming in again. Most people only have their wisdom teeth come in once, if at all, but not people from my family. For reasons that I don't understand, our wisdom teeth erupt through the gums, stay out for a day or two and then recede back into the jaw.

Basically, it means that for about a two-week span every 3 months or so, my face hurts. All of my teeth are being pushed out of place by the new teeth sqeezing up in the back, and I can't even close my jaw entirely because the wisdom teeth stab into unprotected soft parts of my mouth.

Ugh. If I weren't so opposed to personally taking medications to stave off my minor aches and pains, I think I would have spent a minor fortune on aspirin by now.

Cajones of steel

How late is it acceptable to walk into a class? I know that I'm probably more sensitive about these things than other people are, since I run my life by the ticking of the second hand on the clock, but can we agree that there is some point when it is just rude to enter class after it has already started?

I'm not begrudging people the ability to come into class a little bit late. We've all had days where we overslept our alarm, caught every single light on the drive to school as a red, or took just a little too long in the shower that morning.

This morning in my Federal Courts class (which is 50 minutes long, meets in a small classroom, is a seminar class so small that the professor takes attendance usually just by looking around and knows all of our names), a certain martial-arts aficionado/former cult-member who makes his children partake in crazy family rituals came to class late.

Class begins at 9:30. He sauntered into class at 10:11. When there are only nine minutes of class left, is it really justifiable to walk into the room? At that point, wouldn't you just call it a missed class and take the additional nine minutes to ease the rush of the morning?

What surely must be a 9 on the “Eloi” scale:

In case you haven’t noticed, I tend to be a bit of a complainer. I know. I know… You can all stop the gasps of, “No… Really?” As much as I focus on bad news and critical self-examination, sometimes things need to be put in perspective.

A friend of mine has been working on an extraordinarily long and complicated document for the law journal at Washburn Law. She has poured her heart and soul into making her essay good enough for the ridiculously critical editors (I refuse to call them ‘comments’ and ‘notes’ since those are simply replacement words to make our shared discipline more esoteric and unfriendly to the lay citizen).

The document has taken her what has to be the better part of a year from beginning to end, and the research she has done to make the document technically correct would put to shame some of the Masters’ theses I’ve read.

This essay has been her life. She has spent weekend after weekend at the law school working on this essay from early in the morning until late at night. She has foregone important social activities and personal luxuries to finish the document in a manner in which the editors of the law journal could accept.

The fully finalized version of the document is due on Friday. Like everyone with a project that they care about, her last two weeks have been a virtual nonstop fevered frenzy of work trying to make it just a little bit better by the deadline.

Yesterday, her computer went down. It took with it the document, including all of the recent changes she had made in the past several weeks, effectively leaving her only the copy that the law journal editors had last, and over which they had so thoroughly berated her for what they viewed (quite obsessively) as its poor quality.

The data recovery team at Best Buy said that there was no recovery possible.

As if this news were not enough to induce a terrible whirlwind of panic and general hopelessness, she also discovered that day that he brother was in the hospital after sustaining a head injury which left him unresponsive for quite a while. It was serious enough a head injury that he had been kept at the hospital for a full day while the physicians ran a battery of tests to see if anything was seriously wrong (hemorrhaging, brain damage, and such).

At the end of my high school career, I had a few days like these. I had known before then that other people suffered, but only after experiencing great suffering myself was I acutely aware of how bad life can sometimes be. I underwent what might be called a crisis of faith, and thought I understood what could be meant by the Aramaic/Hebrew phrase, “Eloi, Eloi, l’ama sabachthani” (My lord, My lord, why have you forsaken me?). These were turning points in my life which still shape the person I am.

This woman, though, taught me a lesson today. Despite her deep loss of a project which is important to her, and the uncertainty and fear caused by her brother’s injury, she showed up to school this morning, looking… well… normal. She was well-dressed, stoic, and even managed a few smiles and some friendly banter.

I don’t know if it is a sign of my own personal weakness or of the inner strength of this one woman, but whichever of these options may be correct, I have to stop and salute the durable material out of which ideal Plains people are made. With as much flak as Kansans sometimes take for our image as backward hicks, we breed a special type of person out here from rough farmer stock that I wouldn’t trade for the world. Any woman who can bear a burden like hers with a straight back, squared shoulders, and a face resolutely turned forward deserves some sort of Congressional medal for bravery in the face of adversity.

Eloi, Eloi? Keep her strong, and remind her that she has the love of her friends and family.

Sometimes you just have to tie down memories

Sometimes, I feel like some things are more damaging to me because I keep them locked away in the deep well of my mind rather than putting them on paper or thinking about them. If I drop them down the hole, and drown them in the waters at the bottom of the well, I like to think that they are gone. Unfortunately, I'm discovering only too late that sometimes the memories don't stay where I put them. This post is my attempt to tie down a particular thread in my life by putting it in writing. Considering how much I love to have people listen when I speak, it means something when I say that I'd be obliged if you didn't read what follows in this post, and that even if you do, that you don't comment on it. This particular post is my form of visiting a free psychologist.

When I was nine, I moved from a small town in Kansas, to Topeka. Whether by nature or by nurture, I don't know, but I'm a coward at heart. My first instinct when I face danger is to run, and when I can't run physically, I run mentally. Retreating into yourself makes it hard to interact with people, though. Because of this, I've always been shy and afraid of trying new things, and uprooting a young child from his few hard-won friends and neighborhood and taking him to a totally unfamiliar place is pretty hard on a developing kid. I didn't know anyone in the neighborhood. I didn't know anything in town. I didn't know anybody at the church my parents took me to. And as usual, schoolchildren were merciless to the 'new kid.' I was teased, hit, kicked, and excluded from most school activities with other children.

After 3 years without much change, I got to leave the elementary school that I hated. I hated it for the other kids. I hated it because of the way that recess seemed to revolve around playing sports instead of using swings, slides, and monkey-bars (the bits I liked back at my old school in rural Kansas). I hated the school because of the teachers that constantly compared me negatively with my older brother. One teacher's first sentence to my parents in a parent teacher conference was, "Well, he's certainly not as gifted as his brother..."

When I got to go to the junior high school, I was ecstatic. While all of the students would be going with me, we would be adding another 3 or 4 schools worth of students. For once, it meant that being in a crowd of new people wouldn't be so awful, because then (at least) I could be anonymous.

I wasn't anonymous for long. My reputation as a nerd quickly got around. The kids again teased me for my good grades, for my participation in academically-oriented extracurricular activities instead of sports, and for simple things like not knowing the rules to basketball when we were forced to play in gym class.

About halfway through the year, a new student arrived at the junior high. His dad worked for a big company as a veternarian and had been transferred into the Topeka office from somewhere on the East Coast. The new student's name was Nikolaus Drake Richardson, and he was immediately popular. He was good at sports. All of the girls had crushes on him. He came from a slightly richer family than the average students at the school. But in addition to all of these things, he was in the Gifted program with myself and the other nerds.

Nik was also in the same gym class with me. I hated gym class. It was one non-stop humiliation session as I tried desperately to make it through a class period without messing up too terribly at some game I didn't understand with teammates who didn't like me and resented the fact that I was assigned to their team. During the Autumn one day, we were playing football (it was supposed to be touch-football, but that didn't stop most of the guys from trying to hurt each other while playing). My team was down by just a little bit, and I was trying to do what I usually did during the forced games of football. I would run in the direction my teammates ran, but try to keep myself as far away from the ball as I could so as not to interfere too much with their attempt to win. This day, however, I was keeping close to one guy on my team, and one of our teammates on the other side of the field decided to throw a pass to the guy I was next to. My reflexes aren't fast, and I'm not very coordinated. I tried to get out of the way, but I wasn't quite fast enough. The guy who was supposed to catch the football and then make an easy point for our side yelled at me to get out of the way, but I tripped. Then he tripped over me, and the ball went rolling across the field.

I felt badly about our loss. I thought it was bad enough that I had (at least) participated in losing the game for our side, but my teammates thought it was a bit more serious than I did. When we were back in the locker room, one of the guys held me against the gym lockers while some of his cronies spit on me.

Nik (who was on the winning team) saw this and came over to the angry jocks who were spitting on my shirt and ordered them to stop. He normally spoke very loudly, but when he told them to go take their showers and leave me alone, his voice was firm and deadly quiet. It was the sort of quiet where you know that violence is only a moment away and one false move will bring the fury of hell down upon you. For Nik to take on four jocks at once would have been a bit of a hard fight, but beating up the most popular guy in school doesn't earn you many points in the popularity contest, so they took one last look at me and retreated to the showers. I thanked Nik and I can still remember his words to me that day. "Don't let them do that to you, Matt. If you let them walk all over you, you'll end up becoming just like them."

Nik and I got to be good friends after that. He introduced me to role-playing games, and we played Starcraft online with each other for hours on end some weekends. It was great. I spent many a weekend over at his folks' place north of where I lived, and he gradually started to pull me out of my shell. He introduced me to new friends, and gave me a lot of confidence.

Nik and I both joined the Debate and Forensics team at the high school. We both excelled at policy debate, and while I was a skilled orator, Nik was a superb actor. Because we both had talents in this area, we went to a lot of the same tournaments together. I remember some of the long tournaments when we would sit and play cards for hours and hours. Peon and the President was our favorite game, and I recall that I trounced Nik in most every single game. Even though he consistently lost, he laughed and played again and again.

Fast forward to 1998-1999... Senior year of high school. Even if I wasn't popular, I was tolerated, and people didn't treat me as badly as they once had. During high school, I didn't have to be afraid of people pushing me sideways into the lockers, tripping me in the hallway, or doing any number of the other things I had previously been used to them doing to me. And it was all because Nik protected me long enough for me to get on my feet.

On February 1, 1999, Nik killed himself and I couldn't stop it.

It's been seven long years, man.

I'm sorry, and I miss you.

Court cases covered in class that made me laugh (pt. 2 of 3)

case 2: from "Federal Courts" class. Osborne v. Bank of the United States, 22 US 778 (1824).

Just after the (in)famous McCulloch v. Maryland where the Supreme Court held that States could not tax the Bank of the United States, this facts of this case went down...

Ohio issues a tax on the Bank of the United States to the tune of $100,000 (think of how much $100K would have been in the early 1800's...). They tell the bank to pay up, and the bank tells them to go away, citing McCulloch.

Ohio says, "Screw you. We're OHIO. You can't tell us what to do because we are so awesome." To demonstrate how supremely badass Ohio is, they send in a special team of government agents who go to the bank, pull out their guns, and steal the 'owed' tax from the federal bank. When the money is deposited with the State's banks, the Federal government figures that turnaround is fair play, and send in armed thugs to steal the money back, Jesse James style.

If the idea of Ohio committing armed bank robbery because it thinks it's a good idea isn't awesome, then I don't know what is.

I'm scared...

I watched the State of the Union speech tonight and agreed with a few things that the President said. Is it possible that a radical environmental totalitarian neo-socialist and the President have some kind of common cause? Eerie. The world seems somehow a little less familiar now than it did a few hours ago.

A brief list of things I don't understand, but wish I did:

1. Quantum computing

2. String theory

3. How classic pro-life people can justify simultaneously demanding that a fetus be given for free all the things necessary for its survival (over the interests of another being) and calling for an end to socialized medicine and right to free health plans for all citizens.

4. Why I don't feel guilty when I eat a pork chop, even though I know that an adult pig has a continuing sense of self (the necessary mental prerequisite to generate and sustain interests).

5. How other people think.

6. Why some women persist in thinking of themselves as being physically flawed despite being pretty enough that in another life where the Academian was tall, dark, and handsome (and why not add that he'd drive a Lexus, live in the dream house he's always wanted, and be just gangsta enough to warrant the appellation 'White Choklit'), women like this would have made the Academian's head turn with an audible, "Damn, girl." If you can qualify for any term with the suffix
'-licious,' shouldn't that be good enough?

7. Why 'house-husband' is not a legitimate occupation

8. What code provision provides the answer when the angry elf professor asks the following question: "What's it all mean? Have we just marched the King's men up one side of the hill and down the other again?"

9. Why my friends can remember that I'm on a diet when my birthday comes around, but my parents can't remember to call or send a card until the Saturday afterward when they show up 30 minutes late.

10. Why I felt compelled to sort a bag of skittles into equi-numeric piles of component colors and discard (read: eat) the remainder before munching down on the balance of free skittles MindSpewer gave me.

Added bonus: I was going to add an item that said, "Free bonus thing I don't understand: Why I felt compelled to make this list 10 items long," but then I thought about it and realized that that would make it 11 items long and so deleted the extra 11th item... Does that make me a little on the OCD side?

Court cases covered in class that made me laugh, (pt. 1 of 3)

case 1: from civil procedure class. Cited in the Civil Procedure book on page 159...
United States ex rel. Mayo v. Satan and his Staff, 54 F.R.D. 282 (W.D. Pa. 1971). Basically a court refuses to hear a man's case in forma pauperis in part because he has not told the court how to serve process on the Prince of Darkness and his demon-spawn. Amazingly, we never mentioned it in class despite it being in our reading assignments in the book.

Fundamental truths of the universe...

The main reason gamer geeks don't get laid...

Strange reminiscence

For no particular reason this evening, I was thinking about some of the things that have happened to me in my life. I’ve been cataloguing (mentally, of course) some of the more important things that have occurred during my 25 years on the planet, and (blame it on the Eric Clapton I have playing in the background) I’ve realized that I’ve lived through a lot more than I have given myself credit for in earlier posts.

While I may not have ever been on a roller-coaster, watched the Godfather movies, or been in a relationship with a woman that didn’t end with her laughter or her pregnant with some tennis-player’s child or a form-letter rejection, I have done quite a lot of things, and been through much more eventful things than many other people, I’d wager.

There have been good things in my life. I have spent an entire night stroking the hair of a friend as she slept with her head on my chest after staying up for hours talking her through a breakup. I have been named one of the top 20 scientific minds of students my age by a Kansas university. I have qualified for and competed in national tournaments for my policy debate skills. I’ve been told that I should have considered a career in music because of my voice. I have dedicated my life to living as decently as I believe I can manage, even if I seem apt to have a failure of my will more often than I would like.

There have also been bad things in my life. I’ve held the small fragile body of my only pet dog, my sweet little Mitzi (a 3.5 lb Yorkshire terrier inherited from my grandmother), while the veterinarian killed her with an injection after she had a fully incapacitating stroke. I’ve looked into the face of a close friend (to whom I literally owed my life), as he lay in his coffin after cutting his wrists not hours after I last saw him. I walked out of my high school prom alone after discovering that my date was playing a cruel joke on me as part of a dare.

I have lived with the knowledge that my brother and I were a cover to make our family seem normal in small-town Kansas, and to cover up the marriage of convenience for my parents so that nosy people wouldn’t pry.

I’ve waited in fear through my father’s occasional heart attacks and my mother’s bout with cancer, knowing that my father’s father died of a heart attack, and my mother’s mother died of cancer.

I have saved the life of a person I did not respect by using CPR on her while she was unconscious until the paramedics arrived.

I will soon get to be the best man at my only brother’s wedding to a marvelous woman, and I couldn’t be happier about the whole event.

So while I may have room to complain that my life hasn’t contained some of the things that I might otherwise wish it would contain, I certainly can’t claim that I haven’t lived 25 years worth of experiences. My life is uniquely my own, and I have thus far played my hand as best as I was able with the cards dealt to me by fate, and I should be proud of the way I have negotiated the game.

While I as yet may not have lived an ordinary life (as I would like), I can be comforted by the fact that I have lived an eventful life.

I must be missing something

Today, I got to sit down and watch my favorite movie, The Phantom of the Opera (see the previous post about why I love Mondays). Everytime I've watched that movie, I realize that I like it all the more. Today, though, was a bit different. This time, while I watched the movie and listened to the songs I know by heart, I tried to think about what the movie says.

Most of the movies I watch have some sort of message that they are trying to impart. Indeed, most artistic works have that as a firm foundation for the story. Stories don't accidentally convey a message; a story is created to relay the message the artist wanted to convey.

When I finally thought about the message of POTO, I was horrified. The "moral of the story" is a terrible one to think about.

If you have never seen the movie or watched the show, I'll tell you how the story goes so that you understand the moral of the story:

Our hero, the Phantom, is very ugly, desperately poor, and lives in the sewer. Despite being a man of great genius and intense emotion, he is despised, exploited, physically and verbally abused, and is reduced to scrounging his life out beneath the Paris Operahouse. After living a life of unaccountable misery and desperate loneliness, he falls in love with a woman who has a beautiful voice. To help her, he gives her the benefit of his musical genius and she profits as a result.

Enter our villain: Raoul. Raoul is rich, handsome, and largely untalented. He has never had to worry about anything in his life, has never wanted for the adoration of others, and has been surrounded by luxuries since the day of his birth. Desiring the object of the Phantom's love, he steals her away from the Phantom.

Rather than give up, the hero says, "Enough is enough!" and demands of the universe that, since he is a basically good man, he should be allowed one tiny bit of beauty and happiness in his life. When he reaches out to take the woman he loves back, the universe rebuffs him and causes him extra anguish he would not have endured if he had simply let her go with the man who did not need the happiness and beauty in his life.

In the end, she goes off with the villain, and leaves the hero, miserable and alone, to walk the sewers for the rest of his life (which turns out to be a long time), knowing that what should have been his was wrongfully taken from him and that there is nothing he can do about it.

While I love the tragedy of the story, the message seems to me to be fairly clear when I lay out the story that way: Don't seek to rise above your station in life. Get used to the fact that society will value the rich and handsome above raw talent and genius, and that those in the latter category should be content to sate themselves on the drippings from the tables of their betters (i.e., the rich and handsome crowd).

That's clearly a terrible message for the movie, and an awful thing to suggest about the world, even if it seems to be true sometimes. I refuse to believe that I like a story with an embedded bad moral so much, so there must be something I'm missing.

What it is, though, I have not yet figured out.

Why Mondays are the best day of all

I love Mondays this semester. In fact, I wish I had more days during the week just like today.

My Monday starts out with a single class at the law school, and then I come home for the rest of the day. I don't have to go anywhere else. I don't have to be anywhere else. I don't have to do anything else. And, of course, I'm lazy enough to admit that I refuse to do any homework on Monday.

Being left to my own devices is great. I enjoy being able to take a long nap around 1:00 pm when I normally get a little dropsy. I can play World of Warcraft online for 6 hours straight and don't feel like I'm wasting my time while waiting for my next class to start. I can watch a movie with the lights off in the middle of the daytime, just because I can, and nobody can tell me differently.

I would much rather have my Saturdays and Sundays operate like my Mondays than how they work now. As it is, nothing makes me get out of bed on the weekends, so I sleep in late. How much better would it be if I were required to get up for a 9:00 class or something on each of those days and then take the rest of the day off? And that plan has another advantage, too... I'd have two fewer classes to go to during the week sometime. Fabulous.

On a positive note, I did all of those things today. Mixing my favorite game with my favorite movie, and shoving a 3.5 hour nap in there somewhere makes for a mostly satisfied guy. And to be even more upbeat, I normally have two classes on Thursday (the same class I have on Monday morning plus another later in the afternoon). My afternoon class has been canceled that day, so Thursday will be a repeat of Monday this week, and, once again, I will have a day entirely left to my whims.