Since I'm already being accused by his colleagues of wanting Peter King's job (duh!), I thought I might as well ring in with my thoughts on the NFL's supposedly wayward wide receivers, Terrell Owens and Hines Ward. In both cases, I'm with the player.

What no one seems to bring up about T.O. is last year's fiasco where his former agent screwed his chance at free agency. With his contract renewed by the Niners, he was then traded to the Ravens and then again the the Eagles. Now, he was able to engineer a trade to a team he wanted and subsequently signed a solid long-term deal, admittedly. But he missed out on a chance to truly test his value on the open market at the prime of his career. Now he's sitting on a contract that will be terminated by the other party in 1 to 3 years, and everyone is yelling at him to honor that deal. Under those circumstances, I say fight for what you can get.

The Hines Ward situation is even more of a slam dunk for me. Here's what Steeler fans (at least the few who are against Hines--most seem to be on his side) are missing: if this were just about money, Ward would play out this year and go on the open market for 2006. This is about Ward wanting good money to play for the Steelers. Given that, I don't see how any fans can be against him here. He's a four-time Pro Bowler, he's two years younger than Owens, he's the only Steeler who has consistently played well in recent years in the playoffs, and he's the absolute heart and soul of his team. He should be paid like it, and shame on the Steelers for drawing this out and jeopardizing a potential championship season.

Like a good poker hand, I am now suited after spending a long weekend as a human clothes-horse. I actually got the suits I needed in Bridgeville at the first stop--navy blue and grey suits, 5 ties, and belt. My dad gave me a lot of shit for the ties and belt, because he's been doing all his shopping here and here for years, and doesn't understand that you occasionally have to spend over $10 for a single garment. Besides, even if I overpaid a bit for the ties, I made up for it by getting three nice sweaters that were 60% off an already reduced price (under $35 total for all three) because they basically found them in the back and needed to dump them quickly. Total cost for all of the above: $604, including tailoring, plus they're sending them to the Ann Arbor store gratis.

But we weren't done. After lunch, we drove (via Downtown Pittsburgh) to Uniontown and the Bon-Ton where Dad had seen some dress shirts in my freakish size. We picked those up along with some socks. On the way back across the mall, I wandered into a Finish Line. I'd been wanting a Casey Hampton jersey for a while, but they still don't seem to be on-sale. My second choice, Troy Polamalu, was not in stock either, so I went with the #1 draft pick.

On Saturday we went back to Uniontown for a family lunch, which somehow turned into more shopping. The best part was hitting Wal-Mart for an oil change, and while I was browsing during the wait, I came across a #43 Polamalu in my size, and for half the price of Finish Line. Score. Of course this necessitated a third straight day at the mall (almost certainly a personal record), as I returned #83 to Robinson Town Centre on my way back out of town on Sunday.

A few other bits of interestingness from the trip:

• I hit 100,000 miles in the car in Toledo on Thursday, and my car didn't instantly fall apart. Again: Score.
• When Eat 'N' Park shuts the lights out on you, even if it's early afternoon, you get the hell out of dodge. Evil Otto could attack at any time.
• It turns out I drove more in the last four days then I had driven since January 8th inclusive. Weird.
• The Ohio turnpike has Starbucks in many of the rest areas; I give the new green tea Frappuccino an A-.
• I took U.S. routes 30 and 250 most of the way through Ohio on the way back, and in Norwalk I saw a church sign that said, "Never give Satan a ride; he'll aways want to drive." I can't really add much to that one, folks.

Tomorrow after work I drive home to see the folks and go suit shopping for the fall interview season. I'll be back in A2 on Sunday night, and then summer really gets into the home stretch.

Interviewing works like this. By Monday we have to have identified 30 firms we want to interview with, and rank them 1 through 30. Career Services takes those rankings and uses some magic formula to assign everyone 15 to 25 interviews, each of which is 20 minutes long, to take place over the course of the Monday to Thursday before classes start (August 29-September 1). In September and October, some of those firms will be flying me to L.A. and/or Miami for half-day interviews, hopefully leading by November 1 to one or more job offers for next summer.

So, yeah, I'm gonna need suits. Finding big and tall suits is apparently a trickier business than I'd realized, so Friday has serious ordeal potential. Otherwise, though, this is my one trip home between last Christmas and this Thanksgiving, so family time will be at the heart of the trip. You know, presuming I'm not wondering around department stores with a glazed look all weekend.

As I've alluded to before, 45 minutes a day on the treadmill (especially when you still haven't picked up an iPod) will make your mind go a-wanderin' to some strange places. Adding a little sensory input doesn't necessarily help. Yesterday I was about 2/3rds of the way through when an undergrad comes along and sets up on the next treadmill, but first she goes up and opens the window. As I couldn't help but notice, she was wearing "Go Blue" shorts. Go Blue is a pro-Michigan sports thing; I don't quite get it, but whatever, that's not the point. The point is, "Go Blue" written across the ass.

So I get to thinking, just what is the deal with the ass-text shorts? As best as I could theorize, there are three possible states of mind that lead to investing in and wearing the ass-text shorts:

1. Some kind of quasi-feminist resistance thing, operating along the lines of: "I caught you staring at my ass, and I hope you've learned a valuable lesson from all this."
2. Some low self-esteem, needy feeling along the lines of: "On the off chance that any of you aren't looking at my ass, I'm going to draw some extra attention to it," or
3. "I want you to know that I can't say no to anyone or anything, including the most low-brow rungs of the fashion industry."

Any opinions on which is right or on possibilities I've missed?

Just a quick note today, rooting for Kristan, Jefferson, Lisa, Lydia, Sam, and anyone else I'm forgetting to kick the Bar in the jimmies over the next 2 or 3 days depending on their state.

Many places have some sort of art fair that they wisely shovel off to some local county fairgrounds or similar-type place. Ann Arbor takes a different approach, basically shutting down all the streets in the downtown and campus area in favor of the booths. This was basically fine on Wednesday and Thursday when I worked all day and didn't go much of anywhere. I got to walk around some of the closer exhibits on my lunch hour, and got all the culture, edification, and enlightenment I needed.

Today was a different story. I actually had to walk around town, not for art fair-related reasons, but to, you know, live my life. All of a sudden the town's cultural event of the year is now my mortal enemy. I walked around pissed off because people insisted on moving at half a mile an hour at best, not paying attention to where they were going; I got increasingly angry there are parts of the workd where 50-year-old women find it acceptable to walk around in public in red-white-and-blue T-shirts that say "American Cutie" and have gigantic butterflies on them; I remembered why people with certain temperments should stay within 25 miles of one of the coasts at all time. An hour later, having gotten the hell away from downtown and gotten some coffee into myself, I was feeling less misanthropic, but I probably never would have gotten out of that mess with my sanity intact if it weren't for another helping of culture and edification.

Since DVDs have taught us to see TV shows more distinctly in terms of seasons, I've been telling people that my single favorite season of any one TV show was the first season of Scrubs. People tend to see this as a quirky choice, and I'm fine with that. I also enjoyed the second and third seasons quite a bit before drifting away from the show this year in my no-TV exile. Then this summer I borrowed a copy of the first season of Arrested Development, and I thought I might have a new champ. Just about that time the first season of Scrubs finally came out on DVD and instantly became my first DVD-season purchase. (Or, more accurately, the first one for me--having bought Soap and Sledge Hammer for my dad as gifts.) The problem was, as much as I enjoyed the AD season, I wasn't ready to sit down and watch another whole season right away.

Over the last week and a half I've finally gotten around to watching the Scrubs discs, and with all due respect to the Bluths, J.D. and company are the winners and still champions in my book. Very quickly I remembered all the reasons I loved the show from the start*--hilarious dialogue, 5 to 6 well-crafted, complex characters, and at least another half-dozen or more bit players who always bring something to the table. I can't get through an episode without laughing out loud, and usually I can't get through one without feeling deeply saddened, or solemn, or touched by something, and almost as often I come away with something to think about. Every episode has an A story and B story and usually a C story that come together thematically, and that teach us something new about the characters and about their job.

(*OK, this is a little white lie--the commercials before the show debutted made it look horrible, I ranked it high in that year's Laplaca Open, and then when I saw a screener of the pilot I knew I'd made a horrible miscalculation.)

And then, of course, there's Dr. Cox. John C. McGinley says on one of the DVD extras that what appealed to him about the character was that he could be the most damaged human being on prime-time TV, and it's so true. The reluctant mentor is a stock character with a long and cliched history. But Dr. Cox is something different--reluctant to be a mentor not because he considers his mentees(?) to be future competitors or impossible greenhorns, although in some episodes it might seem that way. The revealing moment comes late in the season, though, when J.D. stays late with a patient well past the end of his shift, giving up a date. When Cox realizes what's going on he has his most painfully honest moment of the season: "You want to be like me, newbie? Don't you realize that most of the time I barely want to be like me?" It's a brutal statement from a brutally honest show, that repeatedly comes back to the idea that you can know exactly what your owns faults and shortcomings are and still have no idea what to do about them--and in fact, that in they end, they will literally kill you. It's not the stuff of your typical three-camera, laugh-track sitcom.

I can't wait for season two on DVD and/or syndication.

After three days of waiting, I finally found out that I did not make Law Review.

In plausibly related news, I also found out last night that you shouldn't try two drinks for the first time in the same night, both of which have "bomb" in their name.

I just finished watching the final episode of The Scholar, which I hadn't seen before. The main action with the admissions committee and whatnot was filmed at USC's Philosophy Library. When I was preparing for my quals I spent a lot of time in there, and it was the great unknown gem of the USC library system. It was empty all the time, even though it was really comfortable and a great place to work. In fact, my main memory of the place was at a meeting of the history grad students, when someone mentioned the place and James Bell (one of our colleagues) tried to shush them down to prevent any more people from finding out about the place.

The day after my last final this spring, I found out that James passed away from a longtime illness. He was 56. He'd been sick for a really long time and had had a rough life anyway (long history of drugs, alcohol, you name it--about which he was very forthcoming), but hearing it was still a shock. I've never known anyone who turned their life around quite as much as he did, and he was an inspiration in that regard. Like most grad students he could be a pain in the ass at times too, and I'd be lying if I said we were best friends or anything. But he was a good guy and he wasn't insane, which put him in the upper half of my grad school compatriots.

Reality TV often makes me upset, but tonight was a whole different thing.

If you've got a little bit of spare time and a little bit of spare cash, here's something you might want to consider.