Another road trip

I'm leaving Ann Arbor tomorrow, and the move-out is almost complete. Just some last cleaning, and then loading the car, and I'm ready to go. My friend Foley is flying in tonight to make the trip with me, and it should be fun.

It's hard to say when I'll be back to Ann Arbor again. It's a great college town; I've really enjoyed my time here, and I will miss it. There's nothing like Ann Arbor in October, when the weather is still warm, the leaves are starting to turn color, and students tailgate before a football game. And the winters aren't really so bad.

Anyway, we hit the road tomorrow, and I'll try to update along the way.

"I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know."

Said George W. Bush today, when he admitted that his "bring 'em on" talk from three years ago was a mistake. It's about time. The statement bothered me when he said it, even though I know he probably intended the statement as a display of faith in our troops in Iraq. Having friends in the army and on the ground in Iraq at the time, it seemed totally inappropriate for someone not on the battlefield to make such an inflammatory remark.

Even though this acknowledgement of setbacks is politically motivated, it's still nice to hear.

"Lost" gets lost in the hype

While the media and the majority of viewers were focused on the faux talent-search "American Idol," they missed the season finale of the best show on TV, "Lost." That show rules. I don't know why so many people are so passionate about Idol, but they're missing a show with brilliant writing, brilliant acting, and breathtaking visuals. Can't wait for Season 3.

Here's to Bill Woo

I just found out that one of my favorite Stanford professors, William Woo, died of cancer last month. He was a great teacher, and he wrote several recommendation letters for me after I graduated. He was a big baseball fan, and every now and then we'd exchange emails about MLB goings-on. Before he came to Stanford he was the editor-in-chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and as he liked to say, "the first not to be named Joseph Pulitzer." The class I had with him was Opinion Writing, where he helped improve my writing immensely.

Pearl Jam

The set list:

Pre-set Ed solo: Gone

Set List:
Long Road
Corduroy
World Wide Suicide
Severed Hand
Animal
Marker In The Sand
In Hiding
Even Flow
I Am Mine
Army Reserve
Insignificance
Garden
Wasted Reprise
Life Wasted
State of Love and Trust
Come Back
Jeremy
Rearviewmirror

1st encore:
Man Of The Hour
Small Town
Nothingman
Inside Job
Alive

2nd encore:
Whipping
Do The Evolution
Comatose
Given To Fly
Why Go
Porch
Indifference
Kick Out The Jams (by the MC5)
Yellow Ledbetter/(Star Spangled Banner)

An amazing show. Nearly 3 hours on stage, rockin' the entire time. The Palace started turning the lights on while they were finishing "Kick Out the Jams," but they just kept playing. As I asked my fellow concert-goers in the car ride home, has there ever been a better American rock band? I don't think so.

I'm over it; sounds like Holmgren finally is too

Interesting article about the Seahawks meeting with the NFL's head official about the calls in the Super Bowl. After the meeting, Holmgren finally has "closure." Good.

I'll never believe that the game was evenly called, and therefore I'll never believe that the Hawks got a fair shot at winning. But I'm over it, and in retrospect I'm very happy that my team was even in the game. It must be very difficult for the coaches to live with it, but it's good to know that they're ready to go in 2006. We're going to need the coaches this year, especially when Shaun succumbs to the Madden Jinx and suffers a knee injury in week 4.

I saw the Da Vinci Code

It sucked. But, I will give it credit for being a faithful adaptation of the book. The book sucked even worse.

The movie really didn't have much to work with -- the book's characters are shallow and the puzzles are lame. The movie is better, though, because it saves us from Dan Brown's awful writing. So I would recommed to all who haven't read the book: if you're interested in learning what the fuss is all about, skip the book and watch the movie.

Poor Barbaro

Count me among those who are hoping Barbaro survives on his new leg. The Kentucky Derby winner, who shattered his leg in the Preakness, had surgery yesterday, and now has 23 screws and a metal plate in his leg.

I had always wondered why horses must be put down if they break their legs. Turns out that horses just won't allow themselves to heal properly -- they have too much energy, they won't lie down, and they can't avoid putting weight on it. How sad is that? The horse has to die because it can't keep still.

I was really rooting for Barbaro, who was undefeated going into the Preakness. He had a great chance at the triple crown. Now we have to hope that 23 screws and a plate can save his life.

The most overrated book of all time... is now the worst movie of the summer!

The reviews for The Da Vinci Code are awful... has anyone seen it? I thought that it might actually work as a movie -- it was a terribly written book, but I thought the action, the visuals of the paintings, and the silly puzzles would translate to the screen. Guess I was wrong. I haven't seen it yet, and maybe now I'll wait for the DVD.

The curse continues

The lesson: if I root for you, you'll lose. Latest examples: San Jose Sharks, Detroit Pistons.

I'm thinking I might start rooting for the Tigers next.

It pays to be a Supreme Court clerk

The Washington Post reports that the market rate for signing bonuses alone make Supreme Court clerks paid the same as Supreme Court justices. An associate justice is paid $203,000/year. The signing bonus for a SC clerk is $200,000. Zoinks.

I have no shot at being a SC clerk, but some of my (former) classmates do. The signing bonus for an Alaska clerk is probably a fish sandwich.

Totally done

Yesterday I turned in my last paper, and now I'm totally done with law school. Nothing left to do. It's over.

I'm also staying in Ann Arbor for two more weeks, so that means I have absolutely nothing to do during that time, except for packing. So far today, I've done nothing but watch TV. Life is good. If only it would stop raining around here... it has rained for about a week straight, and will rain for another 5 or 6 days. Unusual for around here.

Hmmm. Okay. Back to the couch.

Final West Wing

What a disappointing end. This was, for a couple years, my favorite show on TV. It was sad to see it peter out like this. The final episode spent far too much time setting up the new administration, as if viewers gave a crap about Jimmy Smits and his staff. I cared about seeing the old characters one last time, to see how they felt about leaving, to see where they would go next. I wanted some storyline to be resolved. Didn't happen.

Richard Schiff got zero screentime, which sucks because Toby was one of my favorite characters. There was a little drama about whether Jed would pardon him or not, but we knew he would, so that was lame. Josh got only a couple scenes, Sam only a couple, very little with other supporting cast. Too much Santos, too much Mrs. Santos, too much time spent explaining how busy Inauguration Day is.

And for the detail-oriented viewers out there, the show didn't even check its facts regarding the history of the Inauguration. In the opening scene, Abby asks Jed whose idea it was to have the Inauguration in January. Jed says, "Jefferson, Adams, Madison." Which is plainly wrong. Until the 20th Amendment in 1933, the inauguration was in March. Stupid West Wing writers. Hat tip to Grostic for throwing a crazy fit when this happened, and never shutting up about it for the rest of the show.

Now I'm just waiting for "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," the next Aaron Sorkin show (fictional behind-the-scenes of SNL-like sketch comedy show) starting this fall.

Listening to...

I love avocados. And the CD is good too. I'll be seeing Pearl Jam in concert on 5/22 in Auburn Hills... for some reason I've never seen them in concert before.

Good job, stadium stat guy

I never really thought about this before, but somebody in every MLB team's PR department has to think of a positive stat to put on the big screen when the player is up. For some players it's easy, for some it's really hard. Adrian Beltre, it appears, is the biggest challenge of them all. This from the folks at Seattlest:

Every player gets a positive-seeming statistic flashed on the scoreboard when he comes to bat. But Beltre's been so terrible (he's hitting .221), this is what the Mariners PR staff had to resort to during last night's game:

Hitting .307 when wearing alternate blue jersey

Ha ha ha.

Oh no! Goodbye, Larry's

Sad development in Seattle-area grocery store news... Larry's Market is filing for bankruptcy.

That's all the news I have right now. Life is boring while I'm trying to finish this paper.

Oh, here's the other thing I wanted to say. You know about this David Blaine stunt that went awry on Monday? People have been blasting him because he failed to hold his breath for the full 9 minutes. Me, I'm actually happy to see that it was a legitimate stunt, and not some illusion. All his other stunts, with the underground box, and the standing-on-the-pillar, and the fasting-in-a-box, and all that crap... it's much more impressive to think he was actually doing it. I always assumed there was some illusion at work, but seeing him actually fail at the hold-your-breath thing makes me think all those tricks were real. Maybe they weren't, but I'm more likely to think they are now.

This is the benefit of screwing up... we used to encounter the same problem sometimes after really good improv shows in college. We would have a show without too many mistakes, and the audience would sometimes accuse us of pre-planning our scenes. Nope, they were never pre-planned, and it would have been more obvious if we had had one or two major mistakes (which most improv shows have). Anyway, I say, good job David Blaine. I'm more impressed now than I was before the latest trick.

Today was a weird day

The day after. I've graduated, and people are starting to move away. Luckily, I'll be here for a few more weeks and there's a good bunch of people staying for a while before bar-studying starts. It's a really weird feeling, though. Graduated.

Graduation has hit me as a much bigger and important milestone than my 30th birthday. The new decade really doesn't mean much, but graduation means a whole lot. New place to live, new people to see, new jobs to do. I don't get too stressed about the little things like exams, public speaking, and the like, but big changes like this always make me nervous/excited/sad. I'm going to miss law school a lot, and all the things about it. Ann Arbor, classes, the law quad, the professors, the people. (I'm definitely in the minority in this respect -- most of my classmates can't wait to move on. I dunno... I think I was in my element here, that's all.)

The worst thing about my current situation is that I still have a paper to write for a seminar class. So I can't quite move on with post-law school life yet. I'm still partly in, partly out.

Anyway, an exhauting week is over. Last week I was a student in my twenties, today I'm a lawyer in my thirties. Weird.

Grad day

Sorry for the slowdown on this space... it's been busy. I graduate today.

Bi-pedal dog

Okay, this might be the craziest thing I've ever seen. This dog walks like a human. All the time.

For the video, click here. (Windows Media Player)

Whoa.

Too young to be this damn old

I turn 30 today. Holy crap.

Goodbye, 20s... it was fun.

Colbert at the Correspondents Dinner

If you didn't see it, you can find it on YouTube. It was amazing. Stephen Colbert was his usual self, brimming with irony and roasting the president and the press for all their faults. He was hilarious. But the crowd... silent. Some smatterings of laughter here and there, but overall, they sat there in shock as he skewered them. It was almost uncomfortable to watch it, because it felt like he was bombing. But he wasn't -- the material was spot-on. The crowd just didn't want to hear it.

I was confused by the crowd's reaction. The Correspondents Dinner always features a roast-like atmosphere, with the president and the press taking turns teasing themselves and each other. Why was Colbert any different? Salon.com has it pegged, I think:

Then he turned to the president of the United States, who sat tight-lipped just a few feet away. "I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."

It was Colbert's crowning moment. His imitation of the quintessential GOP talking head -- Bill O'Reilly meets Scott McClellan -- uncovered the inner workings of the ever-cheapening discourse that passes for political debate. He reversed and flattened the meaning of the words he spoke. It's a tactic that cultural critic Greil Marcus once called the "critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems." Colbert's jokes attacked not just Bush's policies, but the whole drama and language of American politics, the phony demonstration of strength, unity and vision. "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady," Colbert continued, in a nod to George W. Bush. "You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday."

It's not just that Colbert's jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more "truthiness" than truth.

. . .

Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and enforce everyone's clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke Cunningham playing poker at the Watergate?) Similarly, White House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist. "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function," wrote David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram." "It's critical and destructive, a ground clearing."

So it's no wonder that those journalists at the dinner seemed so uneasy in their seats. They had put on their tuxes to rub shoulders with the president. They were looking forward to spotting Valerie Plame and "American Idol's" Ace Young at the Bloomberg party. They invited Colbert to speak for levity, not because they wanted to be criticized. As a tribe, we journalists are all, at heart, creatures of this silly conversation. We trade in talking points and consultant-speak. We too often depend on empty language for our daily bread, and -- worse -- we sometimes mistake it for reality. Colbert was attacking us as well.

He wasn't just making fun of the people in the room -- that's what the president did with his funny bit with the impersonator. Instead, he lampooned their language, calling it for what it is: empty and meaningless... a.k.a., "truthiness." Language is a politician's and journalist's only tool, and without it, they are powerless. Colbert showed that the president and the media are firing blanks. It was a message they didn't want to hear. No wonder Laura Bush wouldn't shake his hand.

UPDATE: The New York Times has its take.

The curse

I've never been too into hockey; Seattle has never had an NHL team, so I just didn't follow it too much. After moving here, though, you can't help but know how the Red Wings are doing, so I started to follow them a little. By the time this season's Stanley Cup playoffs started, I was actually interested in watching them play, and I hoped they'd win. I watched every game of the series.

I should not have been so cruel to the fine people of Detroit. I should have known that my taking a rooting interest in a team would doom them. I should have known that this would happen: tonight, the Red Wings, the NHL's top regular season team and #1 seed in the playoffs, lost to the #8 Edmonton Oilers in six games. They gave up 4 goals in the 3rd period to lose 4-3.

To me, this is just another disappointing finish to a season for just another team I'm rooting for. To Detroit fans, it's a major kick in the gut.

So I must apologize to all Red Wings fans. I didn't mean to do it. Better luck next year.

(Next year's victim: the Alaska Aces.)