It's that time again... time for another BULLET POINT UPDATE!

• Tomorrow is our last day of classes. I am about knee-deep in panic (and sinking) about my Contracts exam (7/28); less so about my Property exam (8/1). Tomorrow I'll be putting the finishing touches on my Contracts outline and then jumping into the stack of practice questions our prof has kindly provided for us.
  
• OmniOutliner Pro: An excellent investment if you have outlining to do and you want to avoid the utter suck that is MS Word's outline numbering.
  
• Tomorrow at lunch we're having an Electronic Blue Book installation session. I really think it adds insult to injury to have to take the exams in Windows.
  
• In an attempt to find something to distract me from panic long enough to fall asleep at night, I downloaded Damages. I'm four episodes in, and it's quite good.
  
• After exams, we have about two weeks off before the fall starters get here and we have Orientation II: This Time We Have A Library. (The Law School is just finishing a gigantic renovation of the library and adding a new commons area. It's gonna be sweet.)
  
• I still can't quite grasp that the term is already over. It's really flown by, even for a shortened semester.
  

Waste like this is part of the reason you're paying $4 for gas (and, coincidentally, why HP can't afford to pay contract technical writers what they're worth, *COUGHCOUGH*).

And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that, although HP is notorious and egregious where this is concerned, Apple also has demonstrated a fondness for putting papers in boxes, as anybody who's ordered Applecare will attest.

Dark Knight: Wow.

Stephanie "I Hate Film For A Living" Zacharek is wronger than usual, which is pretty wrong.

Also, the trailer for Watchmen came on before it. It looks great. As does Quantum of Solace.

Mummy VII: This Time It's In China? Not so much.

Can this be the same Bush administration that thinks Obama is irresponsible for wanting to talk to Iran's leadership?

"You should change your battery or switch to outlet power immediately to keep from losing your work."

This message popped up when I was working in Windows on my Macbook.

And I thought to myself, "Self, if you had a spare battery and no outlet power, and you changed the battery, what would happen to your work?"

Does anyone else find it confusing to have IndyMac, FreddyMac, and Bernie Mac in the news all at the same time?

via chuckdarwin: Boy, neocon whiners get butthurt over the silliest things.

This country would not be nearly so entertaining without free speech for stupid people.

Dear JOSHUA MITCHEL:

Thank you again for your purchase of a PCS Phone from Sprint.

Your rebate of ¤50.00 is in the final stages of processing and should be mailed to you within the next four weeks.

Thanks for choosing Sprint.

Sincerely,
Sprint

I'm not sure why I didn't think of looking for something like this before. I'm glad I did.

I've got Time Warner Roadrunner cable internet, which is pretty fast once it knows where it's going, but holy SHIT is their DNS service crappy. Resolving DNS is the period when your browser says "Looking up [sitename]." It should be relatively instantaneous--a second or two at most. All it's doing, after all, is looking up the site name you provided in a database and translating it into a numeric IP address.

Comcast's DNS in Denver had occasional burps and hiccups, but for the most part it worked okay. Not so Time Warner's DNS here in North Carolina. Most sites take a minimum 3-4 seconds to resolve; occasionally, sites like Google and CNN take upwards of 10 seconds.

I went to the site linked to above and switched over, and now sites load much quicker.

Something I wish a politician would say instead of just flatly denying "flip-flopping" charges:

"Grownups can sometimes change their minds on substantive issues when presented with new evidence. That doesn't make them hypocrites or flipfloppers. It makes them grownups, and it's what differentiates them from George W. Bush."

It's been brought to my attention that "supermarket" is either an old-person or pretentious term.

I was surprised to learn this.

I'm replacing it with "the mercantile" in my vocabulary henceforward. But do any of my other young friends (or even the not so young) want to confirm or deny?

via missrachael, noting that this is worksafe, kidsafe, familysafe, etc., and entirely safe for everybody and every animal in the video (but may not be safe for any boxes of tissues you have handy):

I can imagine no circumstances in which a person would not be glad s/he watched this video.



I'm not ashamed to admit that this made me cry.

Un-fucking-believable.

Watch George Bush take credit for--and offer John McCain credit for--Senator Webb's GI Bill expansion.

This is the expansion BOTH BUSH AND MCCAIN HAVE BEEN FIGHTING AGAINST FOR THE LAST FOUR MONTHS. Bush signed this bill ONLY because Congress passed it with a veto-proof majority.

Every time I think this administration can't surprise me anymore with the depths to which it can sink, it manages to lower the bar.

So, as we're nearing the end of the George W. Bush Presidency, I think its time to start reflecting on just how shitty these past eight years have been.

We've been at war in Afghanistan for all but nine months of Bush's Presidency. Unless the next President succeeds in getting us out of there mighty quick, we will eclipse the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan early in his first term.

This, remember, is the first war that Bush got us into that we were supposed to win quickly and be out of by Christmas. I scarcely need mention that there's another little war we started in another Middle Eastern country that we're also not out of yet, do I?

But surely the Republican devotion to laissez-faire capitalism has strengthened our economy, right? It couldn't, say, have created a perfect storm where our skyrocketing national debt weakens the dollar, our international police actions combined with our shortsighted energy policy crafted in large part by oilmen friendly to the Vice President sends oil prices from $20 to $140 (detrimentally affecting EVERY SECTOR of our economy not named Exxon), and our utterly naive belief that industries will TOTALLY police themselves and behave with the public interest in mind have the US circling the economic drain?

This is a President whose domestic policy consists of sticking his fingers in his ears and going "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU." He's a President that the moderately competent can't work for, and that even the utterly inept despise as beneath them.

And he's done all this with a backdrop of expanding Presidential power even more, so that he can make ever larger blunders with wider-ranging repercussions. In short, he's managed in his eight disastrous years in office to do what Osama bin Ladin has wet dreams about: he's set the U.S. on a spiral toward ruin.

George W. Bush loves America like OJ loved Nicole.

So, can any of you guess what this banner ad linked to?

And, if so, can you explain to me why?

Justice Scalia may be a reactionary jerk, but I sure do like reading his opinions. I don't know if I can explain why I found this snide little citation at the end of his opinion in Nollan hilarious enough to laugh out loud at, but I absolutely did:

Rather, California is free to advance its 'comprehensive program,' if it wishes, by using its power of eminent domain for this 'public purpose,' see U.S. Const., Amdt. 5; but if it wants an easement across the Nollans' property, it must pay for it.

--Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (SCOTUS, 1987, 483 US 825)

ETA: James Dobson, though, is just a douchebag with no redeeming rhetorical qualities.

So, with the student loan refund arriving today, I could finally get pick up a few necessities--a bunch of cat food, a couple more pairs of shorts, some highlighters and paper, a 750-GB backup hard drive, a toner cartridge, a bigger hard disk for my Macbook, and some light bulbs.

We had double Contracts today (because our Property professor is out of town and we needed to make up the Contracts class we'll be missing on 7/4.

In the afternoon class, we discussed the IVF cases from yesterday, and the professor broke us up into four groups--one was a legislative subcommittee considering IVF legislation; the other three were various special-interest groups.

And, of course, I was chosen spokesman of the Catholic Laypersons' Leadership Organization, and had to argue for a position that is diametrically opposed to my own. It was a pretty cool experience, especially since I got professorial kudos after class--he asked if I was actually a Catholic, and said that I had pretty much nailed the position's actual arguments.

It gives me some hope that I might not be as ineffective an advocate as I have feared. I'm kind of looking forward to trying out for moot court in the spring.

Yow.

Today's Contracts homework included Halbman v. Lemke (WI 1980, restitution when minors disaffirm contracts) , Batsakis v. Demotsis (TX 1949) (judicial inquiry into the value of consideration), Kass v. Kass (NY 2000) , AZ v. BZ (MA 2001) (two cases that reach seemingly opposing public-policy conclusions about the disposition of fertilized embryos in IVF cases), and, almost as an afterthought, Raffles v. Wichelhaus (a.k.a. The Peerless Case).

Trying to wrap my head around the implications of this last case after reading the first four feels a little like what I'd imagine trying to win an Olympic weightlifting competition would feel like after running a marathon.

turma fart - (n) - a pun whose sole saving grace is that it relies on professional jargon, greatly limiting the number of people who groan at it

Example:
Anne's high school has a huge spring dance for juniors and seniors every year that most impartial observers would agree is the best in the state. Her school's principal, a family friend, makes a personal vow to Anne that Anne's senior dance will be the best the school has ever held. Believing this promise, Anne purchases a very expensive dress and induces her boyfriend to hire a limousine to transport them to and from the event. On the night of the dance, however, she arrives at the school gym with her date to find only a few card tables set up in a corner with cans of generic diet cola and plates of saltine crackers, and a handful of couples swaying desultorily to elevator music piped over the school's intercom.

Distraught and in tears, Anne flees outside, intent on returning home. There is a steep grassy embankment next to the area where the limousine is parked, and Anne slips and falls, staining and tearing her expensive dress, and gouging a large scratch in the limousine's door with her shoe.

Does Anne have a case on the grounds of prom-is-sorry ass topple?