So, um, wow.

I don't think I've ever been at a game that could quite compare to yesterday's rivalry comeback super-mega excellent Braylon Edwards-fest. I was at a 53-52 Pitt-Temple suckfest where Pitt came back from 19 down, but that was mostly about incompetence on both sides. This was good teams, though, and great players making great plays.

Standing on steel bleachers for four and a half hours is exhausting. It's even more so when you spend much of the final hour hoisting crowd surfers--both the standard pushing up variety (Mullet Man's ex visiting from Jersey, hoisted for each point after each score, which accumulates very quickly in overtime), and the passing from row 1 to the top of the stadium variety. We passed through section 32 a person in a lobster costume and a person in a chicken costume, the latter twice.

So if I looked tired today, it's because I passed a lobster and a chicken yesterday. That'll take some wind out of your sails.

El Testator takes away Chris' freedom, with the help of the ever-present beer straw. 

El Testator poses with'80s jogger dude. Note the brilliant beer straw solution (as first posited by Norm Peterson) for dealing with the small mouth hole. 

Apparently, when I blog while extraordinarily drunk, the following things happen:

• The self-pity gets ratcheted up. Slightly.
• The distinction between commas and periods goes out the window.
• The stream-of-consciousness level stays pretty much the same, which is to say, hey, look over there!
• I can still form full sentences. Mostly.
• I abbreviate a whole lot more.
• I can still make the links work.
  

All good to know...

So here I am, sitting at home after the law school Halloween party. There were some good mitigating factors: at least 8 people did not know who I was (hint: there aren't THAT many 300-pounders in the law school), at least 8 people asked if the temporary tattoos were real (no, but after tonight I'm tempted to make them so), and at least 8 people took embarrassing pictures of me that they will no doubt email and that I will no doubt post. OTOH, here I am at the end of the night, home alone as always. I've been meaning to post more about this, and maybe I'll get time to soon, The costume, BTW, was a Mexican wrestler ("El Testator"), and in addition to the Los Straitjackets mask, I bought some temporary tattoos, spiked glove and wristband, and an evil bandanna. for around the neck. It's probably my most elaborate costume since mom made me this incredible Orko in 6th grade. Also cool is that I finally have the biceps to carry off evil-looking temp tattoos w/o looking like a total moron.

Last night I laid down to take a nap at about 8 p.m. and woke up at 7:30 a.m.; funny what a screwed up sleep schedule (often filled w/ lacking) will do to you,

The political section of today's entry is provided via Ms. LaSalle, through our mutual friend Jeetander, and basically discusses why our current president is a stupid head who should be voted out. Jeetander was soberer when he wrote his bit, though, so it's more eloquent and whatnot. My contribution ends up simply being that I'm driving voters to the polls all day on Tuesday; hopefully it will help contribute to the most important political victory of our lifetimes. For those of you who know me, you must realize just how important this is in that it has actually made me overcome the apathy and do something on Tuesday; no mean feat.

Actual conversation among law students at a bar within the past week:
LS1: Is it kind of odd, maybe self-stereotyping that the Women's Law Student Association is holding a bake sale as a fund-raiser?
LS2: I can go you one better than that.
LS1: Oh?
LS2: The Black LSA is having a date auction; yes, they're auctioning people!

I bring this up only because it sparked in my own mind one of my favorite jokes that only I get, which I thought I'd explain here in case I ever make it. I watched a whole lot of Superfriends as a kid, and I have a very distinct memory of one episode with Darkseid, the lame-o last season villain. The basic premise was that there was some auction bringing together all the various bad guys from across the universe to bid on WMDs of one sort or another (not that they called them that, but, you know), and the big item at the end was some color of kryptonite (I'm not enough of a geek to keep my kryptonites straight) that would take away Superman's powers forever.

So Darkseid shows up at this auction, and he's clearly the lord-god-king bad guy, and no one's messing with him. When the kryptonite comes up for bid, the enthuasiastic auctioneer suggests that the bidding for such a rare item should begin at 100 million bleans. At this point Darkseid pipes up for the first time, in his super-deep evil voice, and says, "ONE BLEAN". All the other bad guys and the nervous auctioneer are too intimidated to say anything at this point.

For some reason, this has always stuck with me, and so whenever there is a situation that involves jumping in with a ridiculously low figure for some goods or services, I always (at least in my own head) come in with a bid of ONE BLEAN!

(IIRC, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and maybe Batman infiltrated the auction as bad guys from some ice planet or something and ended up overbidding Darkseid to the shock and dismay of all, then getting discovered, then sneaking the kryptonite away so Superman could come in and kick some ass; or maybe it all backfired and Superman ended up getting delorted, and all hell broke loose and evil reigned supreme. I don't really remember, but it's beside the point anyway.)

Today's case-related wackiness: We're reading a Property case on implied warranty of habitability, which is basically the idea that if you rent a residential property that has serious code violations, you can stay and withhold rent in proportion with how badly the violations diminish the value of the property. This replaced constructive eviction, where you could only withhold rent if you also abandoned the premises.

Anyway, the case we have for explaining this involves a horrific slumlord who refused to fix locks, windows, electrical outlets, raw sewage in the basement--just a bad bad bad landlord in every way. The court talks about how in our modern urban society, most rentals are not farmlands (where the old doctrines developed), but urban residential properties with tenants who can't be expected to take on all the maintenance of apartments themselves, etc.

So, you're wondering, where's the wacky part? Well, the modern, urban society they discuss, with slumlords running all over the place, is freakin' Rutland, Vermont circa 1974.

Obviously, I'm not counting games where a team I actually root for wins. Apart from those, however, given my deep-seated hatred for JoePa, this may be my favorite football result ever.

It's funny, you spend a couple of years typing out some of your more random thoughts for your own edification and with the hope of amusing 100 25 maybe 5 of your friends, and at some point along the line you forget that you're actually publishing for anyone who happens to wander by, and you're actually, in essence, publishing to the world. So you get burned a little bit when you forget that a little too much, and start typing out things that really aren't for general consumption--not out of malice, but just because sometimes you don't think things through--and then parts of that world take you up on your invitation to read what you've written. And thanks to the magic of google and archiving and spiders and whatnot there's really no way to take back those things that you put out there, so you throw up your hands, take your whackings where they're due, say you're sorry even if you have to do it without really saying you're sorry, and you move on with the understanding that you'll be more careful after that, for your sake and others' sake too.

Yeah, it's kinda like that.

Sometimes in Property you have to read a sentence like, "As stated in complainants' brief, the liability of defendant to complainants depends upon whether the transfer of the leasehold interest in the premises from Rogers is an assignment of the lease or a sublease."

But sometimes in Property, you get to read a sentence such as, "Like the parties here, after Joe Piscopo and his wife married in 1973, they focused on one goal -- the facilitation of his rise to stardom."

So it pretty much all evens out in the end.

(Dukeminier & Krier, Property, 5th ed. p. 486, 413 respectively, for the morbidly curious.)