So now I'm working on outlining Torts. Yeah, um, Torts, that's what I'm working on...

Setting the scene:

• Friday night
• young
• Lights: low
• Where to go?
• right music
• high
• in the scene
  

Identifying king:

• Could be any guy

To do:

• Dance
• Jive
• Have time of life
• See girl
• Watch scene
• Dig dancing queen
• teaser
• leaves 'em burning, then gone
• looking out for another
• Feel tambourine beat
  

UPDATE: In response to WestBerkeleyFlats's excellent question, I listened and compared the two versions. BF2 has quite a bit going for it, and I'm particularly fond of the team fight song meme whereby the current year's players can be inserted into a pre-existing song for new fun each and every year. (See, e.g.) But in the end I don't think you can beat the original due to the "12 years straight/play that great" rhyme, and the reference to not mattering which county you're from, which all but says that they were the White Flight Bullets at that point and were "Washington" in name only.

-j

Have you ever wished that a whole bunch of music about the Washington Bullets had been collected in one place? Well, God Shammgod's Mix Tape is for you.

My favorite part has to be Nils Lofgren's "Bullets Fever":

They've made the playoffs for 12 years straight
It takes a lot of pride to play that great
Seven years in DC have given us all
A magic game called basketball
Makes no difference which county you're from
The speeding Bullets play for everyone

In a related note, it's good to see Wizard fans aren't bitter people. If I were DEK, I'd probably rate that link as "25 points" for the history of Argentina value. OK, maybe not--but the history of Argentina in the last link is quality humor, even if you don't care about basketball, Argentina, and/or wizardry.

Sieve Pro is done, two classes down and two to go; Torts Monday, Con Law next Thursday, next Friday I move two blocks, the following Monday I start my summer job in the law library. It's all happening very fast.

If you want to read a really funny story that's not the slightest bit safe for work, check this out.

Some evidence for how outlining torts is going...

Results of getting knocked down:

• I get up again
• Possible conclusion: never gonna keep me down

Things he drinks

• whiskey drink
• vodka drink
• lager drink
  
• (distinguish: “beer”?)
• cider drink
• possible explanation for pissing night away?

Things he sings

• songs that remind him of the good times
• songs that remind him of the better times
• Danny Boy

Have I mentioned that I have problems?

YOU ARE RULE 20(a)!

You are Rule 20, an important part of the Federal Rules' policy of permissive joinder. You are designed specifically to allow as many parties in an action as can be tried efficiently, and you'll include someone as long as there is some factual overlap between a claim involving them and the rest of the case at hand. You are popular, out-going, and are never far from friends. However, your overly gregarious nature and magnanimous approach do make things a bit crowded--you're the reason that lawsuits are often cluttered with innumerable parties and even more numberous claims for relief. Still, despite the crowds that you attract, you can't argue with the efficiency of getting everything done at once!


Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I may need help. Lots and lots of help...

Citation: IN v. Taylor (1974)

Problem:

• Π wants Δ; Δ can't go back there

Defenses:

• If man ever needed dyin’ he did
• No right to say what he said
  

Consequences of leaving:

• Cold; lonely
• Want to talk to you
• Cannot touch hand
• Never see sunshine
• Tired
• Cannot see:
• You
• Our home
• Our little baby

Takeaway points:

• Forgive me
• Hang on to happy years

Sometimes you'll read in the paper that someone you knew back in the day has done something good, and that's always nice. Then sometimes you'll read that the creepy kid you used to play tennis with two to three times a week back in high school was arrested because he allegedly stole money from international students on the basketball team at a local college where he was a volunteer coach, provided them with alcohol, performed sex acts on them when they passed out, videotaped it, and got caught because he sold another student the TV (presumably /VCR) with the tape still in it.

I don't even have a joke for this one, folks.

I don't know what this says about the stress level, but...


Things I don't:

• Do:
  
  • Practice Santeria
  
  
• Have:
  
  • Crystal ball
    
  • $1 million
    
    • Did, but spent it all
      

Things to Do:

• Find Heina
  
  • Slap down
  
  
• Find Sancho
  
  • Pop cap
  
  
• Find a Heina of own
  
• Love one and all
  
• Live it out
  

Things I can't define:

• What I really wanna know
  
• What I really wanna say
  

Things to tell Sanchito:

• Best go run, hide
  
• Daddy has new .45
  
  • won't think twice to stick barrel straight down throat
  
  
• Should believe me
  
  • got something for punk-ass
  
  

Things soul will have to do:

• Wait

Law-dweebiest meme ever: Taking songs and putting them in class outline form. Note the comments are great, but so far the original is the best one I've read. The number of these I write in the next two weeks will be directly proportional to my overall stress level...

Mr. Infield-Harm has passed along the information that my former advisor, mentioned in the TRASHionals post, is now an independent publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror titles operating out of Portland, Oregon.

She also writes her own stories, and I must say that I really enjoyed this one.

Finally, if you're wondering what it's like to start up your own small publishing house, this interview will be of interest.

So, you'd have to be a crazy person, or you'd have to have a damn good reason to go out of town for a three day weekend a week and a half before law school finals. I'd like to think in my case, it's the latter, but I'll let you judge. First, though, I need to go into Sophia mode for a bit...

Picture it, Pittsburgh, April 1993. Nirvana and Boyz II Men are on the air, the Toronto Blue Jays are just starting a successful World Series title defense, and I'm an 18-year-old college freshman in the thralls of a technology called "newsgroups." (It will be two more years before I see the World Wide Web.) The last time I check rec.sport.pro-wrestling and clari.news.columns.dave-barry et al before going home for the summer, I see a listing pop up for alt.college.college-bowl on the list of newly available group. Having competed in high school and without distinction at College Bowl Regionals that spring, I took note and saved the group to read in the fall.

When I got back to school in the fall I started reading, and discovered that there were colleges out there playing college bowl variants throughout the school year at universities around the country. I was intrigued, and I looked into getting some school funding; the Pitt Program Council agreed to send us to one tournament, as Regionals practice. Then I found out about the Nittany Lion Invitational Tournament at Penn State a few weeks later. I arranged with some friends who had been on the Regionals team (or close to it) to travel up there, and we crashed on the floor of Doug O'Neal's apartment.

The week of the tournament I told my adviser at the Honors College, Deborah Layne, about the tournament, and she said, "This sounds like something we should be funding." I can tell you that it was somewhere around October 20, 1993, although I can't tell you the exact date. However, there's no doubt in my mind that that's the moment to which you can pinpoint the founding of Pitt Quiz Bowl.

Flashforward to 1997. Popular culture ("trash") tournaments had become all the rage by this point, but they were happening here, there and everywhere with no central organization. Trashmasters was undoubtedly the Granddaddy of Them All, but it was largely a Southern affair. There was no true national championship. Several of us had kicked around for a couple of months the idea of trying to have something central in Pittsburgh; it was a nice location between the Midwest, South, and Northeast, we had some good players and organizational types around, and we thought we could pull it off. At some point in the discussion, I even coined a term for it: "Trashionals."

That April, I drove out by myself to a trash tournament at Swarthmore, where I stayed on Fred Bush's floor in the dorms. That night, Fred and I got to talking and it turns out that he had been thinking about a national trash tournament too, but something bigger as well, with a Regionals and Nationals structure, and something that could be done annually. It just so happened that I had the tournament of my life that weekend, which perhaps made an impression; that summer when Fred sent out emails to several very good trash players about starting a trash organization, I got one of the emails. We called the organization TRASH ("Testing Recall About Strange Happenings"), and the following April in College Park, Maryland, we held the first TRASHionals.

Flashforward to this weekend: This weekend was TRASHionals 8: The Fish That 8 Pittsburgh. One organization that I founded finally co-hosted (with Carnegie-Mellon) its first national tournament of any kind. The organization it hosted was an organization I helped co-found. My participation in quiz-bowl has diminished drastically in the past couple of years, and my role in TRASH has been vanishingly small the last two years beyond helping out at TRASHionals. But I went this weekend, I helped out, I made a contribution.

Ultimately, I don't know what was more gratifying--the fact that I could still contribute, or the fact that things would have gone just fine even if I hadn't contributed at all.

So that's the scoop. Now I go into my finals cocoon, from which I will emerge at 12 noon promptly on May 5th. In other words, if you're hanging around in Ann Arbor on Cinco de Mayo and want some lunchtime margaritas, give me a holla'.

Finally, we don't get registration results until May 6th (not coincidentally), but if I got my first choices, I'll be taking Secured Transactions, First Amendment, and Enterprise Organizations--class from 8:45 to 12:15 Monday to Wednesday, 10-11 on Thursday, and that's it. We'll see how that works out...

So with my Sieve Pro final a mere 15 days away, a seminar paper looming, all sorts of end of the year crap and whatnot, I haven't had much time to try to be funny. If you come for the funny, sorry about that, folks. Finals end on Cinco de Mayo; after that, I should be a bundle of laughs.

In the meantime, please make due with this picture of Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg riding an elephant.

Some links to prom pictures, courtesy of Mony...

• Tom and Adie
• Derek and Libby
• Derek and Craig
• Derek and Jessica (Raman is clearly obsessed with Derek.)
• Jessica, Craig, and Joanne
• Raghu, Aisha, and Dan
• T(h?)eresa and Tony
• Julie, Jordan, and a not-looking-happy-to-be-there Tara
• Joe on suicide watch

I finally saw Napoleon Dynamite this week; I liked it, didn't love it. I can't say the same about the Idaho state legislature.

Last night was the Law School Prom, which went a long way toward alleviate the stereotype that law students are dweebs who are just trying to do high school again, only right this time. Um, yeah. Of course, I went. Predictably, the perfect storm of seeing every girl I've had a crush on for the last nine months in formalwear left me in a mood at the end of the night, but mostly it was a lot of fun.

Best discovery of the night: the mojito. As Bria would say, there are not the words.

For those of you who already miss Dan Rather, or think there's never any good news, you should check out the first tune here. Actually, I recommend the whole site of free, legal, generally odd MP3s.

So once again with the disappearing. In short: I was largely drunk and unproductive late last week, sober and somewhat productive this weekend--until my disaster of a fantasy draft (not my team, but the process--drafting a keeper league on Yahoo! is fraught with fraughtness), and I have my big oral argument for the semester in 4 hours, after which I'm basically done with Legal Practice, a two-credit pass-fail 900-pound-gorilla of a class.

In honor of true opening day, here's my favorite opening day item, ESPN.com's National League potential milestones of 2005. For some younger teams they're really desparate to get to three or four; my favorite is that Desi Relaford is 8 RBI away from 300. We're pulling for you, dude!

In between Schiavo, the Pope, Frank Perdue and other such luminaries, I had missed until this morning another significant death. President Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998 and placed him in a roll call of civil rights fighters Plessy, Brown, and Parks. This is true and yet a shame, because he's more directly in a line of civil rights pioneers named Yick Wo, Ozawa, and Thind whose struggles are much less known.